Feedback Control of Impact Dynamics: the Bouncing Ball Revisited

peer reviewedWe study the the design of a tracking controller for the popular bouncing ball model: the continuous-time actuation of a table is used to control the impacts of the table with a bouncing ball. The proposed control law uses the impact times as the sole feedback information. We show that the acceleration of the table at impact plays no role in the stability analysis but is an important parameter for the robustness of the feedback system to model uncertainty, in particular to the uncertainty on the coefficient of restitution

Study and Analysis of Ant System

Alot of species of ants have a trail-laying/trailfollowing behavior when foraging. While moving, individual ants deposit on the ground a volatile chemical substance called pheromone, forming in this way pheromone trails. Ants can smell pheromone and, when choosing their way, they tend to choose, in probability, the paths marked by stronger pheromone concentrations. In this way they create a sort of attractive potential field, the pheromone trails allows the ants to find their way back to food sources (or to the nest). Also, they can be used by other ants to find the location of the food sources discovered by their nest mates