The purposes of this research are to formulate the
equations of motion of the system, to develop computational codes by a finite-element method in order to perform dynamics simulation with vibration control, to propose an effective control scheme using two control strategies, namely proportional (P) and active-force (AF) controls and to confirm the calculated results by experiments of a flexible link manipulator. The system used in this paper consists of an aluminum beam as a flexible link, a clamp-part, a servo motor to rotate the link and a piezoelectric actuator to control vibration. Computational codes on time history responses, FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) processing and eigenvalues - eigenvectors analysis were developed to calculate the dynamic behavior of the link. Furthermore, the P and AF controls strategies were designed and compared their performances through calculations and experiments. The
calculated and experimental results showed the superiority of the proposed AF control compared to the P one to suppress the vibration of the flexible link manipulator.