Control Design of flexible link robots with smart materials

With the great development of control theory and technologies in related areas, robotic systems play an increasingly important role in people's ordinary life and in many military areas. Light-weight flexible-link robot requires less power consumption for high speed operations, which makes it more feasible than the conventional rigid-link robots in many applications, such as nuclear sites, underground waste deposit, deep sea and space applications. These advantages greatly motivate the research in modelling and control of flexible robots. The approaches established for control of rigid-link manipulators are theoretically no longer applicable to flexible ones. Complicated control strategies have had to be investigated to further improve the performance of flexible robots. These reasons have motivated continuous research efforts on the controller design for flexible link robot.

This project also aims to study smart materials robot, namely a flexible link robot embedded with piezoelectric materials, such that the residual deflections of a flexible link can be effectively eliminated. Since piezoelectric materials can be founded along a beam and have excellent electromechanical property to achieve the transformation between the mechanical deformation and electrical field, they are ready to serve as distributed actuators and sensors of mechanical deformations. Therefore, a kind of "smart structures", i.e., a structure with networks of highly distributed actuators, sensors and processors can be formed by piezoelectric materials. With application of smart materials, better control performance is expected to be obtained easily. This is our motivation for considering the control problem of flexible link robots by means of smart materials.