Robotic manipulators are now being required to move at higher speeds while maintaining greater positioning accuracy, it is necessary to consider the flexibility of the members in the design stage to prevent positioning inaccuracies resulted from the elastic vibration. In this paper, a combined finite element-transfer matrix method for nodal analysis of flexible manipulators is developed. In the method, the modeling technique is based on finite element method, the stiffness and mass matrices obtained are used to derive the generalized transfer matrix, and a special state reducing technique is introduced to treat the state vector transfer at joints. With a calculation procedure of simple frequency sweeping, the modal parameters at each instantaneous position can be obtained without any iteration process, so that the calculation accuracy of higher modes can be increased. The method also has advantages that: need less computer memory space; make computational cost sufficiently low; and so on.
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