Nonlinear adaptive control of a flexible manipulator for automated deburring

The goal of the automated deburring can be achieved by maintaining a constant force on the grinding tool in the direction normal to the constraint surface while following the positional trajectory in the direction tangential to the surface. In this paper, the dynamics of both the deburring process and the flexible manipulator are investigated in detail, and a singular perturbation technique is then utilized to separate the system into a slow subsystem and a fast subsystem, whereby an adaptive hybrid position/force controller is derived for the slow subsystem whereas a dynamic feedback controller is developed for the fast subsystem. It is shown that the motional tracking error and the force regulation error converge to a small residual set. Finally, computer simulations and experiments of a 2-link flexible manipulator confirm the effectiveness of the proposed controller.