This paper presents a comparative investigation of the dynamic characterization of flexible manipulators on the basis of accuracy, computational efficiency and computational requirements using finite difference (FD) and finite element (FE) methods. A constrained planar single-link flexible manipulator is considered. Finite-dimensional simulations of the manipulator are developed using FD and FE methods. The simulation algorithms thus developed are implemented on two computing domains and their performances, on the basis of accuracy in characterizing the behaviour of the manipulator and computational efficiency, are assessed.
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