A General Formulation of the Flexible Manipulator Dynamics

In this paper a new non-linear formulation of the flexible-link manipulator dynamics is presented. The proposed formulation is specially suitable for the solution of the inverse dynamics problem by successive approximations. In particular the path of the nominal rigid-link manipulator is modified by adding the elastic displacements and rotations that are obtained from the proposed mathematical model. Moreover the proposed method allows to use the current notations of the rigid-link manipulator kinematics and the calculation schemes familiar in the finite element method to model the links and the loads.