The objective of this SBIR Phase I award is to develop an approach for commanding manufacturing machines to move with greatly increased dynamic performance. The feasibility of a new technique called impulse shaping will be investigated. A rudimentary version of impulse shaping has been demonstrated in the laboratory on simple positioning machines (both in hardware and software). The objective of this work is to formulate this technique for more complex, non-idealized machines. The results that have been obtained to date indicate that this technique, if pursued, could significantly improve the task performing capabilities to a broad range of manufacturing systems and high- performance products.
