As robotic manipulators evolve toward lightweight and long-link structures, flexibility increasingly affects dynamic response and trajectory tracking accuracy. However, existing studies often lack a consistent coupling mechanism between finite element structural models and control models, and flexible effects are typically treated as disturbances, limiting the direct use of structural parameters for control prediction and optimization. This paper proposes a structure–control collaborative co-simulation framework for a six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) flexible-joint manipulator. ANSYS-based finite element analysis (FEA) is integrated with the MATLAB/Simulink control environment to extract joint-level equivalent stiffness, inertia, modal frequencies, and damping parameters, which are embedded into a rigid–flexible coupled dynamic model. A regression-based representation is introduced to capture unmodeled flexible residual dynamics, and a regression-compensated adaptive PID torque controller with σ-modification and a dead-zone mechanism is developed to ensure bounded adaptation and closed-loop stability. Simulation results under no-load and payload conditions demonstrate improved oscillation suppression and tracking accuracy. By establishing a unified coupling mechanism from structural parameters to the control model, the proposed method achieves consistent co-modeling of the structural and control domains and provides an engineering-feasible co-simulation approach for dynamic prediction and control optimization of multi-DOF flexible manipulators under varying operating conditions.
Wen et al. (Fri,) studied this question.