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

Robust Controllers for Regular Linear Systems with Infinite-Dimensional Exosystems

We construct two error feedback controllers for robust output tracking and disturbance rejection of a regular linear system with nonsmooth reference and disturbance signals. We show that for sufficiently smooth signals the output converges to the reference at a rate that depends on the behaviour of the transfer function of the plant on the imaginary axis. In addition, we construct a controller that can be designed to achieve robustness with respect to a given class of uncertainties in the system, and present a novel controller structure for output tracking and disturbance rejection without the robustness requirement. We also generalize the internal model principle for regular linear systems with boundary disturbance and for controllers with unbounded input and output operators. The construction of controllers is illustrated with an example where we consider output tracking of a nonsmooth periodic reference signal for a two-dimensional heat equation with boundary control and observation, and with periodic disturbances on the boundary.Comment: 30 pages, 3 figures, to appear in SIAM Journal on Control & Optimizatio

H∞ Control of Nonlinear Systems: A Class of Controllers

The standard state space solutions to the H∞ control problem for linear time invariant systems are generalized to nonlinear time-invariant systems. A class of nonlinear H∞-controllers are parameterized as nonlinear fractional transformations on contractive, stable free nonlinear parameters. As in the linear case, the H∞ control problem is solved by its reduction to four simpler special state space problems, together with a separation argument. Another byproduct of this approach is that the sufficient conditions for H∞ control problem to be solved are also derived with this machinery. The solvability for nonlinear H∞-control problem requires positive definite solutions to two parallel decoupled Hamilton-Jacobi inequalities and these two solutions satisfy an additional coupling condition. An illustrative example, which deals with a passive plant, is given at the end

Model Predictive Regulation

We show how optimal nonlinear regulation can be achieved in a model predictive control fashion

Robust Output Regulation for Autonomous Robots:self-learning mechanisms, task-space control and multi-agent systems

This thesis focuses on robust output regulation for autonomous robots. The control objective of output regulation is to design a feedback controller to achieve asymptotic tracking and/or disturbance rejection for a class of exogenous reference and/or disturbance while maintaining closed-loop stability. We investigate three research problems that pertain to the constructive design of robust output regulation for fully actuated Euler-Lagrange systems from centralized to distributed fashions. The first one is the global robust output regulation of second-order affine nonlinear systems with input disturbances that encompass the fully-actuated Euler-Lagrange systems. Based on a certainty equivalence principle method, we proposed a novel class of nonlinear internal models taking a cascade interconnection structure with strictly relaxed conditions than before. The second one is the output regulation for robot manipulators working in task-space. An internal model-based adaptive controller is designed to cope with uncertain manipulator kinematic and dynamic parameters, as well as unknown periodic reference trajectories generated by harmonic oscillators. The last one is the formation control of manipulators’ end-effector subject to external disturbances or parameter uncertainties. We present and analyze gradient descent-based distributed formation controllers for end-effectors. Internal models are used to reject external disturbances. Moreover, by introducing an extra integrator and an adaptive estimator for gravitational compensation and stabilization, respectively, we extend the proposed gradient-based design to the case where the plant parameters are not exactly known

On self-learning mechanism for the output regulation of second-order affine nonlinear systems

This paper studies global robust output regulation of second-order nonlinear systems with input disturbances that encompass the fully-actuated Euler-Lagrange systems. We assume the availability of relative output (w.r.t. a family of reference signals) and output derivative measurements. Based on a specific separation principle and self learning mechanism, we develop an internal model-based controller that does not require apriori knowledge of reference and disturbance signals and it only assumes that the kernels of these signals are a family of exosystems with unknown parameters (e.g., amplitudes, frequencies or time periods). The proposed control framework has a self-learning mechanism that extricates itself from requiring absolute position measurement nor precise knowledge of the feedforward kernel signals. By requiring the high-level task/trajectory planner to use the same class of kernels in constraining the trajectories, the proposed low-level controller is able to learn the desired trajectories, to suppress the disturbance signals, and to adapt itself to the uncertain plant parameters. The framework enables a plug-and-play control mechanism in both levels of control

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