LAUSR

Abstract This paper presents a novel and computationally efficient modeling method for the dynamics of flexible-link robot manipulators. In this method, a robot manipulator is decomposed into components/elements. The component/element dynamics is established using Newton–Euler equations, and then is linearized based on the acceleration-based state vector. The transfer matrices for each type of components/elements are developed, and used to establish the system equations of a flexible robot manipulator by concatenating the state vector from the base to the end-effector. With this strategy, the size of the final system dynamic equations does not increase with the number of joints or the number of link beam elements that each link is decomposed. The developed method intends to avoid the traditional computation of the global system dynamic equations that usually have large size for flexible robot manipulators, and only involves calculating and transferring component/element dynamic equations that have small size. The numerical simulations and experimental testing of flexible-link manipulators are conducted to validate the proposed methodologies.