  Fast and safe manipulation of flexible objects with a robot manipulator
necessitates measures to cope with vibrations. Existing approaches either
increase the task execution time or require complex models and/or additional
instrumentation to measure vibrations. This paper develops a model-based method
that overcomes these limitations. It relies on a simple pendulum-like model for
modeling the beam, open-loop optimal control for suppressing vibrations, and
does not require any exteroceptive sensors. We experimentally show that the
proposed method drastically reduces residual vibrations -- at least 90% -- and
outperforms the commonly used input shaping (IS) for the same execution time.
Besides, our method can also execute the task faster than IS with a minor
reduction in vibration suppression performance. The proposed method facilitates
the development of new solutions to a wide range of tasks that involve dynamic
manipulation of flexible objects.

Robotics;Optimization and Control