Department of Electrical Engineering

Flexible Structures Laboratory


A series of fully instrumented flexible structures has been set up for control of slewing and active vibration damping, as well as for system identification and adaptive control studies. Special purpose hardware and accompanying electronics comprise the basic laboratory experimental apparatuses such as a free-free beam and a two-link flexible manipulator (see below). Two new, complex flexible structures have recently been developed. One is the Large Interconnected Vibration Experiment (LIVE), a 16-ft cantilevered mass structure with slewable, flexible panels providing a multi-body experiment platform (see below). The second is a deployable, planar, three bay truss on air bearings (see below). This is a configuration on which high-speed deployment studies can be made providing complex, nonlinear interactions in a structure with multiple kinematic loops. Typically students do research on such structures after taking at least one of our laboratory courses: EE 757 Control Laboratory I or EE 758 Control Laboratory II.



Two Link Flexible Robot


Large Interconnected Vibration Experiment (LIVE)


Deployable Truss



Flexible Truss






This page is still under construction.