Boundary Control of a Flexible Robotic Manipulator With Output Constraints

In this study, we consider a boundary control problem of a flexible manipulator with input disturbances and output constraints, achieving pre‐set performance attributes on position tracking error and the deflection error at the end of the beam. The dynamics of the system are represented by partial differential equations (PDEs). With the Lyapunov's direct method, a boundary controller with disturbance observer is designed to regulate the angular position and suppress elastic vibration simultaneously. The proposed control scheme allows the errors to converge to an arbitrarily small residual set, with convergence rate larger than a pre‐specified value. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.