SDRE applied to position and vibration control of a robot manipulator with a flexible link

In recent years, the evolution of artificial intelligence techniques has widely grown such that it gives new ways to improve human life, not only at work but also living. Nowadays, to the human being, physical human‐robot interactions (PHRIs) have been presented very important and present itself as a major challenge for the current engineering. Therefore, this work designs and analyses a two‐degree‐of‐freedom robotic arm with flexible joints driven by a DC motor. Due to the interaction between the robot links and flexible joints, the arm may present overshoots when it is moved such that it becomes difficult to manipulate the arm. Therefore, Magnetorheological dampers (MR damper or MR brake) are attached to the links of the arm in order to control such overshoot and provide a way to adjust the mechanical limitations of the arm. The dynamics of the system will be investigated, showing the appearance of chaotic behavior due to the coupling of the manipulator to the motors. After that, the feedback control is obtained through the state‐dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) aiming the control of the positioning of the manipulator and the torque applied on the MR damper. Numerical results showed that the proposed control using hybrid actuators, DC motor, and MR brake was effective to control the position and behavior of the flexible joints of the manipulators.

This work presents an analysis of an ocean wave energy harvesting system. This system is composed of a direct current (DC) power generator attached at the middle-top of a floating platform. A pendulum is connected to the generator’s shaft. It is considered that the ocean waves motion swings the platform in the vertical direction, which transfers energy to the pendulum, making possible to convert mechanical energy, induced by the ocean wave, into a rotational motion due the pendulum and after in electric energy due the generator. With the objective to optimize the harvested power, several analyses of the pendulum parameters, ocean wave amplitude and frequency were carried out. This work was based on the Brazilian’s coast characteristics. Numerical and experimental results were performed which shows the efficiency of the conversion of mechanical energy provided by the pendulum into electric power.

In this work, the nonlinear dynamics of an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) operating in tapping mode is investigated, considering the influence of squeeze film damping in fractional-order. Its influence plays an important role because the dynamics of the AFM can be led to different responses, e.g., periodic and chaotic motions, specially the influence of the derivative order when in fractional-order. In a way to characterize the type of behavior, the 0–1 test was used once this is a good tool to characterize fractional-order differential systems. In addition, the linear feedback control technique for fractional-order systems is applied to control the chaotic behaviors. Therefore, the results showed a nonlinear behavior presented by the AFM system. In addition, the feedback control technique was efficient to control the chaotic motion of the micro cantilever beam of the AFM, whose results included variation of parameters of the fractional derivative of the squeeze film damping.