A perturbation method for dynamic analysis and simulation of flexible manipulator

This paper presents a perturbation method for the dynamicsimulation of flexible manipulators. In this method thevibrational motion of the manipulator is modeled as a first-orderperturbation of the nominal rigid link motion. For that purposethe flexible dynamic model is split into two parts. A rigidifiedsystem describes the nominal rigid link motion of themanipulator. A linear system linearized about the nominaltrajectory describes the vibrational motion. These equations arecomputationally more efficient than the non-linear dynamicequations and offer more insight in the dynamic phenomena of thesystem. The method is based on a full non-linear finite elementformulation which treats the general case of coupled largedisplacements motion and small elastic motion. A planar one linkmanipulator and a spatial two link manipulator with flexiblelinks are used for case studies. A comparison is made between thenon-linear and the perturbation analyzes. The perturbation methodappears to be a very efficient approach for dynamic analyzes offlexible manipulators and yields accurate results even forsystems with low frequency elastic modes