We present some feedback control techniques recently developed for the exact solution of t rajectory tracking problems for manipulators with flexible elements. Two classes are considered: i) robots with rigid links but with elastic transmissions, in which flexibility is concentrated at the joints, and ii) robots with lightweight and/or long arms, where flexibility is distributed along the links...

In most advanced real-time control applications such as service robots, the tasks have different criticality, flexible timing constraints and variable execution time. For instance, autonomous service robots perform their activities in dynamic environments, share resources and have to cooperate to fulfill their objectives. These changing environmental conditions produce a variability of the syst...

The setpoint regulation problem for robotic manipulators is a basic task that can be solved either by PID control or by model-based gravity compensation. These approaches are commonly applied both to rigid arms and to robots with flexible links and/or elastic joints. However, PID control requires fine and lengthy tuning of gains in order to achieve good performance over the whole workspace. Mor...

Future space structures are expected to have very large size. Such Large Space Structures (LSS) will be constructed in-orbit, probably by assembling large structural modules. This is a dangerous and difficult task for humans. On the other hand, this is a challenging and promising application for space robotics. This work provides a planning and control architecture for the manipulation of a lar...

Robots are used to perform tedious work in more and more of today’s industrial applications. Traditionally robots are used in applications with well structured and extremely predictable environments like that of a production line. In the last few years new trends within industrial automation has arisen. One trend is to move from mass production to production of customized products [1] which dem...

Flexibility at the joint of a manipulator is an intrinsic property. Even “rigid-joint” robots, in fact, possess a certain amount of flexibility. Previous experiments confirmed that joint flexibility should be explicitly included in the model when designing a high-performance controller for a manipulator because the flexibility, if not dealt with, can excite system natural frequencies and cause ...