Experimental Study on Vibration Control of Flexible Structures Taking Power Assisted Conveyance Into Account

Abstract Power assist devices have been introduced to reduce physical burden of workers in conveying and mounting work in industries. Most of them handle controlled objects as rigid bodies. This paper discusses an effective vibration control method for conveying flexible structures with power assist. In this study, the power assist is realized by an impedance control method. The impedance characteristics of the power assisted object correspond to the dynamic characteristics of the disturbance for the vibration control. Our previous paper discussed a disturbance accommodating LQ optimal control (DAOC) method for the vibration control problem and the effectiveness was verified by state feedback control simulations only. In this paper, the DAOC method is applied to the same cart with a 1-DOF vibration system as in the previous paper but having more flexible structure. The natural frequency of the controlled object is set to 1.0 Hz. The effectiveness of DAOC in this case is demonstrated through actual experiments on the basis of output feedback control implementation.