On the control of complementary-slackness juggling mechanical systems

International audienceThis paper studies the feedback control of a class of complementary-slackness hybrid mechanical systems. Roughly, the systems we study are composed of an uncontrollable part (the "object") and a controlled one (the "robot"), linked by a unilateral constraint and an impact rule. A systematic and general control design method for this class of systems is proposed. The approach is a nontrivial extension of the one degree-of-freedom (DOF) juggler control design. In addition to the robot control, it is also useful to study some intermediate controllability properties of the object's impact Poincaré mapping, which generally takes the form of a non-linear discrete-time system. The force input mainly consists of a family of dead-beat feedback control laws, introduced via a recur-sive procedure, and exploiting the underlying discrete-time structure of the system. The main goal of this paper is to highlight the role of various physical and control properties characteristic of the system on its stabilizability properties and to propose solutions in certain cases

On the controllability of linear juggling mechanical systems

This paper deals with the controllability of a class of nonsmooth complementa- rity mechanical systems. Due to their particular structure they can be decomposed into an "object" and a "robot", consequently they are named juggling systems. It is shown that the accessibility of the "object" can be characterized by nonlinear constrained equations, or generalized equations. Examples are presented, including a simple model of backlash. The main focus of the work is about linear jugglers, but extensions towards more complicated models are considered

On the controllability of linear juggling mechanical systems

International audienceThis paper deals with the controllability of a class of nonsmooth complementarity mechanical systems. Due to their particular structure they can be decomposed into an “object” and a “robot”, consequently they are named juggling systems. It is shown that the accessibility of the “object” can be characterized by nonlinear constrained equations, or generalized equations. Examples are presented, including a simple model of backlash. The main focus of the work is about linear jugglers