The motivation for studying or doing modelling, simulation or experiments of flexible manipulators comes from applications in aerospace industry. So, for example we have on the space shuttle a manipulator arm which is used to deploy satellite into orbit. We also have antennas and solar panels which are deployed from space-crafts.
Now all these structures for space application have to be necessarily very light because we have a premium on the weight. Hence, these structures are all light-weight and flexible. When such flexible and light-weight structures are in motion undesirable vibrations are set up. So, we need to study these vibrations and model these vibrations and to see whether we can reduce these excessive vibrations, and also once if we model it properly and we can study these systems properly and we can reduce the large amount of expensive experiments which are carried out to test the motion of the space shuttle arm or the deployment of structures.
