Adaptive boundary control of a flexible manipulator with input saturation

ABSTRACT

In this study, we consider the anti-windup design as one of the approaches for the boundary control problem of a flexible manipulator in the presence of system parametric uncertainties, external disturbances and bounded inputs. The dynamics of the system are represented by partial differential equations (PDEs). Using the singular perturbation approach, the PDE model is divided into two simpler subsystems. With the Lyapunov's direct method, an adaptive boundary control scheme is developed to regulate the angular position and suppress the elastic vibration simultaneously and the adaptive laws are designed to compensate for the system parametric uncertainties and the disturbances. The proposed control scheme allows the application of smooth hyperbolic functions, which satisfy physical conditions and input restrictions, be easily realised. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Keywords:

• Adaptive control
• boundary control
• PDE model
• input saturation
• singular perturbation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to sincerely extend their appreciation to the editor-in-chief, the associate editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments which helped improve the quality and presentation of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Fund for Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China [grant number 20121102110008]; and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61374048].