Application of passivity-based techniques to the control of structurally flexible gantry robots

The present work deals with the application of a class of passivity-based control schemes to the flexible gantry robots domain. These controllers, which also include an adaptive version, effectively exploit the passivity property satisfied by a suitably defined input and output for the system in con junction with an approximate model of the payload-dominated dynamics. Simulations as well as hardware implementation on an experimental flexible gantry robot demonstrate the efficacy of the schemes, which combine end-point tracking of prescribed trajectories together with active vibrations suppression.