A family of asymptotically stable control laws for flexible robots based on a passivity approach

A general family of asymptotically stabilizing control laws is introduced for a class of nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. The inherent passivity property of this class of systems and the Passivity Theorem are used to show the closed-loop input/output stability which is then related to the internal state space stability through the stabilizability and detectability condition. Applications of these results include fully actuated robots, flexible joint robots, and robots with link flexibility

Global Stabilization of Triangular Systems with Time-Delayed Dynamic Input Perturbations

A control design approach is developed for a general class of uncertain strict-feedback-like nonlinear systems with dynamic uncertain input nonlinearities with time delays. The system structure considered in this paper includes a nominal uncertain strict-feedback-like subsystem, the input signal to which is generated by an uncertain nonlinear input unmodeled dynamics that is driven by the entire system state (including unmeasured state variables) and is also allowed to depend on time delayed versions of the system state variable and control input signals. The system also includes additive uncertain nonlinear functions, coupled nonlinear appended dynamics, and uncertain dynamic input nonlinearities with time-varying uncertain time delays. The proposed control design approach provides a globally stabilizing delay-independent robust adaptive output-feedback dynamic controller based on a dual dynamic high-gain scaling based structure.Comment: 2017 IEEE International Carpathian Control Conference (ICCC

A passivity based control methodology for flexible joint robots with application to a simplified shuttle RMS arm

The main goal is to develop a general theory for the control of flexible robots, including flexible joint robots, flexible link robots, rigid bodies with flexible appendages, etc. As part of the validation, the theory is applied to the control law development for a test example which consists of a three-link arm modeled after the shoulder yaw joint of the space shuttle remote manipulator system (RMS). The performance of the closed loop control system is then compared with the performance of the existing RMS controller to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The theoretical foundation of this new approach to the control of flexible robots is presented and its efficacy is demonstrated through simulation results on the three-link test arm

Lyapunov stabilization of discrete-time feedforward dynamics

The paper discusses stabilization of nonlinear discrete-time dynamics in feedforward form. First it is shown how to define a Lyapunov function for the uncontrolled dynamics via the construction of a suitable cross-term. Then, stabilization is achieved in terms of u-average passivity. Several constructive cases are analyzed

Passivity/Lyapunov based controller design for trajectory tracking of flexible joint manipulators

A passivity and Lyapunov based approach for the control design for the trajectory tracking problem of flexible joint robots is presented. The basic structure of the proposed controller is the sum of a model-based feedforward and a model-independent feedback. Feedforward selection and solution is analyzed for a general model for flexible joints, and for more specific and practical model structures. Passivity theory is used to design a motor state-based controller in order to input-output stabilize the error system formed by the feedforward. Observability conditions for asymptotic stability are stated and verified. In order to accommodate for modeling uncertainties and to allow for the implementation of a simplified feedforward compensation, the stability of the system is analyzed in presence of approximations in the feedforward by using a Lyapunov based robustness analysis. It is shown that under certain conditions, e.g., the desired trajectory is varying slowly enough, stability is maintained for various approximations of a canonical feedforward

Output-input stability and minimum-phase nonlinear systems

This paper introduces and studies the notion of output-input stability, which represents a variant of the minimum-phase property for general smooth nonlinear control systems. The definition of output-input stability does not rely on a particular choice of coordinates in which the system takes a normal form or on the computation of zero dynamics. In the spirit of the ``input-to-state stability'' philosophy, it requires the state and the input of the system to be bounded by a suitable function of the output and derivatives of the output, modulo a decaying term depending on initial conditions. The class of output-input stable systems thus defined includes all affine systems in global normal form whose internal dynamics are input-to-state stable and also all left-invertible linear systems whose transmission zeros have negative real parts. As an application, we explain how the new concept enables one to develop a natural extension to nonlinear systems of a basic result from linear adaptive control.Comment: Revised version, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. See related work in http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~sontag and http://black.csl.uiuc.edu/~liberzo