FINITE-DIFFERENCE AND FINITE-ELEMENT APPROACHES TO DYNAMIC MODELING OF A FLEXIBLE MANIPULATOR

This paper presents a comparative investigation of the dynamic charact erization of flexible manipulators on the basis of accuracy, computati onal efficiency and computational requirements using finite difference (FD) and finite element (FE) methods. A constrained planar single-lin k flexible manipulator is considered. Finite-dimensional simulations o f the manipulator are developed using FD and FE methods. The simulatio n algorithms thus developed are implemented on two computing domains a nd their performances, on the basis of accuracy in characterizing the behaviour of the manipulator and computational efficiency, are assesse d.