Robust IDA‐PBC for underactuated mechanical systems subject to matched disturbances

The problem of robustification of interconnection and damping assignment passivity‐based control for underactuated mechanical system vis‐à‐vis matched, constant, and unknown disturbances is addressed in the paper. This is achieved adding an outer‐loop controller to the interconnection and damping assignment passivity‐based control. Three designs are proposed, with the first one being a simple nonlinear PI, while the second and the third ones are nonlinear PIDs. While all controllers ensure stability of the desired equilibrium in spite of the presence of the disturbances, the inclusion of the derivative term allows us to inject further damping enlarging the class of systems for which asymptotic stability is ensured. Numerical simulations of the Acrobot system and experimental results on the disk‐on‐disk system illustrate the performance of the proposed controller. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adaptive passification and stabilization for switched nonlinearly parameterized systems

This paper studies the issues of adaptive passification and global stabilization for a class of switched nonlinearly parameterized systems. Each subsystem is allowed to be non‐feedback passive. Firstly, a passivity concept for switched nonlinear systems is proposed. In particular, the change of storage functions of an inactive subsystem is described. An adaptively feedback passive switched nonlinear system is shown to be stabilized under the partly asymptotic zero‐state detectability assumption. Secondly, the adaptive feedback controller for each subsystem and a state‐dependent switching law are designed to render the resulting closed‐loop system passive. Finally, a new switched adaptive control technique is developed to solve the adaptive stabilization problem by exploiting the recursive feedback passification design technique and parameter separation technique when all subsystems have any same relative degree. The simulation results on adaptive stabilization of continuously stirred tank reactor system show effectiveness of the proposed design method. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robust attitude tracking control of flexible spacecraft for achieving globally asymptotic stability

The three‐axis attitude tracking control problem in the presence of parameter uncertainties and external disturbances for a spacecraft with flexible appendages is investigated in this paper. Novel simple robust Lyapunov‐based controllers that require only the attitude and angular velocity measurement are proposed. The first controller is a discontinuous one composed of a nonlinear PD part plus a sign function, whereas the second one is continuous or even smooth by modifying the discontinuous part of the first one. For a general desired trajectory, both controllers can achieve globally asymptotic stability of the attitude and angular velocity tracking errors instead of ultimate boundedness. By using a two‐step proof technique, the partial stability of the proposed controllers for the resulting closed‐loop systems in the face of model uncertainties and unexpected disturbances is proven theoretically. To further enhance the control performance, a continuous controller is presented that utilizes the tracking errors for estimating the external disturbances. In addition, stability analysis is done. For all the developed controllers, numerical simulation results are provided to demonstrate their performance. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A family of virtual contraction based controllers for tracking of flexible‐joints port‐Hamiltonian robots: Theory and experiments

In this work, we present a constructive method to design a family of virtual contraction based controllers that solve the standard trajectory tracking problem of flexible‐joint robots in the port‐Hamiltonian framework. The proposed design method, called virtual contraction based control, combines the concepts of virtual control systems and contraction analysis. It is shown that under potential energy matching conditions, the closed‐loop virtual system is contractive and exponential convergence to a predefined trajectory is guaranteed. Moreover, the closed‐loop virtual system exhibits properties such as structure preservation, differential passivity, and the existence of (incrementally) passive maps. The method is later applied to a planar RR robot, and two nonlinear tracking control schemes in the developed controllers family are designed using different contraction analysis approaches. Experiments confirm the theoretical results for each controller.     

Finite‐time tracking control of a nonholonomic mobile robot

In this paper, the finite‐time tracking problem is investigated for a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot in a fifth‐order dynamic model. We consider the whole tracking error system as a cascaded system. Two continuous global finite‐time stabilizing controllers are designed for a second‐order subsystem and a third‐order subsystem respectively. Then finite‐time stability results for cascaded systems are employed to prove that the closed‐loop system satisfies the finite‐time stability. Thus the closed‐loop system can track the reference trajectory in finite‐time when the desired velocities satisfy some conditions. In particular, we discuss the control gains selection for the third‐order finite‐time controller and give sufficient conditions by using Lyapunov and backstepping techniques. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society     

On the Passivity-Based Impedance Control of Flexible Joint Robots

In this paper, a novel type of impedance controllers for flexible joint robots is proposed. As a target impedance, a desired stiffness and damping are considered without inertia shaping. For this problem, two controllers of different complexity are proposed. Both have a cascaded structure with an inner torque feedback loop and an outer impedance controller. For the torque feedback, a physical interpretation as a scaling of the motor inertia is given, which allows to incorporate the torque feedback into a passivity-based analysis. The outer impedance control law is then designed differently for the two controllers. In the first approach, the stiffness and damping terms and the gravity compensation term are designed separately. This outer control loop uses only the motor position and velocity, but no noncollocated feedback of the joint torques or link side positions. In combination with the physical interpretation of torque feedback, this allows us to give a proof of the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system based on the passivity properties of the system. The second control law is a refinement of this approach, in which the gravity compensation and the stiffness implementation are designed in a combined way. Thereby, a desired static stiffness relationship is obtained exactly. Additionally, some extensions of the controller to viscoelastic joints and to Cartesian impedance control are given. Finally, some experiments with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) lightweight robots verify the developed controllers and show the efficiency of the proposed control approach.     

Delay‐dependent passivity and passification for uncertain Markovian jump systems with time‐varying delays

This paper deals with the problems of passivity analysis and passivity‐based controller design for Markovian jump systems with both time‐varying delays and norm‐bounded parametric uncertainties. Firstly, new delay‐dependent conditions for the considered system to be passive are obtained by using a mode‐dependent Lyapunov functional and by introducing some slack variables. These conditions are expressed by means of LMIs that are easy to check. It is shown through a numerical example that the obtained passivity conditions are less conservative than the existing ones in the literature. Secondly, the passification problem is investigated. On the basis of the obtained passivity conditions, dynamic output‐feedback controllers are designed, which ensure that the resulting closed‐loop system is passive. The effectiveness of the proposed design method is demonstrated by a numerical example. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adaptive control of flexible link manipulators using a pseudolink dynamic model

This paper presents a novel adaptive control scheme for a lightweight manipulator arm governed by electric motors. The controller design is based on the dynamic model of the arm in a quasi-static approximation which consists of the transports subsystem and the motor equations corrected for the elastic compliance of the plant. A passivity property of the flexible electromechanical system is established and an adaptive motor controller is developed which contains the rigid manipulator controller as a part. The motor controller updates all unknown rigid manipulator parameters as well as elastic parameters and ensures global asymptotic stability of the tracking errors with all signals in the system remaining bounded. Projecting of parameter estimates is used in the update law to avoid possible singularities when generating control input. Simulation results for a single-link elastic arm confirm the validity and demonstrate advantages of the proposed method.     

Variable structure control of a distributed‐parameter flexible beam

In this article, regulation of a distributed‐parameter flexible beam is considered using variable structure control techniques. The proposed controller can stabilize the system exponentially and the converging speed can be set by the designer as desired. Different from existing variable structure controllers for flexible robots in the literature, the controller presented here is designed directly for the partial differential equations governing the motion of the distributed‐parameter system. Thus, exponential stability holds for the original distributed‐parameter system. Numerical simulations are also provided to verify the effectiveness of the approach presented. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Passivity-based control of a class of Blondel-Park transformableelectric machines

Concerns the extension to the general rotating electric machine model of the passivity-based controller method for induction motors. The motor's passivity properties are used at 2 levels. First, we prove that the motor model can be decomposed as the feedback interconnection of two passive subsystems (essentially, the electrical and mechanical dynamics). Then, we design a torque-tracking controller that preserves passivity for the electrical subsystem and leaves the mechanical part as a passive disturbance. This leads to the cascaded controller structure which is typically analyzed involving time-scale separation. Our aim is to characterize a class of machines for which such a passivity-based controller solves the output feedback torque-tracking problem. The class consists of machines whose nonactuated dynamics are damped and whose dynamics can be decoupled. This requires that the air-gap magnetomotive force must be suitably approximated by the first harmonic in its Fourier expansion. These conditions have a clear physical interpretation in terms of the couplings between its dynamics and are satisfied by many machines. The passivity-based controller presented reduces to the well-known indirect vector controller for current-fed induction machines. Our developments constitute an extension to voltage-fed machines of this de facto standard in industrial applications     

A new approach to robust position/force control of flexible-joint robot manipulators

In this paper a new approach employing smooth robust compensators is proposed for the control of uncertain elastic-joint robot manipulators during contact tasks. It is assumed that the flexible-joint manipulators consist of two subsystems: the rigid subsystem and the flexible subsystem. The output of the flexible subsystem is assumed to be the input of the rigid subsystem. The control design is carried out in two steps. First, a desired input is designed for the rigid subsystem, which can robustly stabilize it. Second, a robust controller is designed to stabilize the flexible subsystem so that it generates the necessary torque designed for the rigid subsystem. By using this approach, the robot manipulator can exert a preset amount of force on the environment while tracking a desired trajectory with global asymptotic stability. Lyapunov's direct method is used here to prove the global asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system. The assumption of weak joint elasticity is relaxed and exact knowledge of joint stiffness is not required for the control design. Also, exact knowledge of robot kinematic and dynamic parameters and actuator parameters are not required. Unlike other approaches, this approach takes the environmental stick-slip friction as well as its dependency on normal contact force into consideration. It compensates for the adverse effects of the stick-slip friction. The proposed controller produces a smooth control action, and ensures smooth motion on the contact surface. The efficacy of the proposed controller is illustrated with the help of a numerical example of a two-link flexible-joint robot. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Trajectory Tracking Control for a Rotary Wing Vehicle Powered by Four Rotors

The present paper presents a trajectory tracking control scheme for an underactuated rotary wing vehicle. The translational controller is designed based on feedback linearization and saturated control. The rotational controller is designed based on the passivity properties of the rotational dynamics. The interconnection between the translational and the rotational controllers is inspired by the backstepping control technique. The final control structure allows to include an integral action that is able to compensate constant disturbances on the rotational dynamics. It is shown that the resulting closed–loop dynamics has a local asymptotic stability property. Numerical simulations show the performance of the proposed controller.     

Mixed H∞ and passive control for linear switched systems via hybrid control approach

This paper investigates the mixed H_∞ and passive control problem for linear switched systems based on a hybrid control strategy. To solve this problem, first, a new performance index is proposed. This performance index can be viewed as the mixed weighted H_∞ and passivity performance. Then, the hybrid controllers are used to stabilise the switched systems. The hybrid controllers consist of dynamic output-feedback controllers for every subsystem and state updating controllers at the switching instant. The design of state updating controllers not only depends on the pre-switching subsystem and the post-switching subsystem, but also depends on the measurable output signal. The hybrid controllers proposed in this paper can include some existing ones as special cases. Combine the multiple Lyapunov functions approach with the average dwell time technique, new sufficient conditions are obtained. Under the new conditions, the closed-loop linear switched systems are globally uniformly asymptotically stable with a mixed H_∞ and passivity performance index. Moreover, the desired hybrid controllers can be constructed by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, a numerical example and a practical example are given.     

Nonlinear H/sub /spl infin// controllers for electromagnetic suspension systems

This note presents a unified framework to derive nonlinear H/sub /spl infin// state and output feedback controllers for magnetically levitated (Maglev) vehicles with controlled dc electromagnets, referred to as electromagnetic suspension systems. The theoretical exposition, based on the Taylor series expansion solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs inequality, is followed by an assessment of some of the practical issues in realizing the nonlinear controllers with a digital signal processor and embedded hardware. A select set of experimental results from a single-degree-of-freedom suspension system is included to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear stateand output-feedback H/sub /spl infin// controllers to suppress guideway-induced disturbances.     

Hybrid control design for limit cycle stabilisation of planar switched systems

This paper addresses the control problem of an important class of hybrid dynamical systems where the desired state does not belong to the set of subsystem equilibria. Beyond the practical stabilisation where the system trajectory has to be driven to a neighbourhood of a desired state, a control law is designed to solve the limit cycle stabilisation problem for planar hybrid systems. Using the hybrid Poincaré map, two hybrid controllers are developed, which guarantee a local asymptotic/finite-time stability of the desired limit cycle. Illustrative examples are provided to highlight the effectiveness of the derived results.     

Boundary Control for a Flexible Inverted Pendulum System Based on a PDE Model with Input Saturation

This research considers the control problem of a flexible inverted pendulum system (FIPS) in the presence of input saturation. The model for a flexible inverted pendulum system (FIPS) is derived via the Hamilton principle. The FIPS model is divided into a fast subsystem and a slow subsystem via the singular perturbation method. We introduce an auxiliary system to deal with the input saturation of a fast subsystem. To stabilize the fast subsystem, a boundary anti‐windup control force is applied at the free end of the beam. It is proven that the closed‐loop subsystem is stable. For the slow subsystem, a sliding mode control method is employed to design a controller and a new decoupling method to design the sliding surface. Then it is shown that the slow subsystem is stable. Finally, simulation results are provided to confirm the efficacy of the proposed controller.     

并联混合有源滤波器哈密顿系统建模及无源控制

并联混合有源滤波器(SHAPF)的控制策略是决定其稳定性和谐波治理效果的关键因素之一,利用SHAPF自身的无源性设计控制器可以取得比常规控制器更好的控制效果.首先建立了SHAPF端口受控哈密顿系统模型,然后基于互联和阻尼配置无源控制方法,提出了一种新的SHAPF非线性控制策略,从理论上保证了闭环系统的渐进稳定.最后仿真实验证明了该控制策略能够有效消除电网中的谐波电流,与传统线性二次型调节器(LQR)相比,该控制策略具有更好的稳态补偿效果和对负载变化的干扰抑制能力.     

A Saturating Extension of an Output Feedback Controller for Internally Damped Euler‐Lagrange Systems

In this research, a novel extension of the passivity‐based output feedback trajectory tracking controller is developed for internally damped Euler‐Lagrange systems with input saturation. Compared with the previous output feedback controllers, this new design of a combined adaptive controller‐observer system will reduce the risk of actuator saturation effectively via generalized saturation functions. Semi‐global uniform ultimate boundedness stability of the tracking errors and state estimation errors is guaranteed by Lyapunov stability analysis. An application of the proposed saturated output feedback controller is the stabilization of a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot with saturated actuators towards desired trajectories. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed controller in dealing with the actuator saturation.     

A passivity approach to game-theoretic CDMA power control

This paper follows a game-theoretical formulation of the CDMA power control problem and develops new decentralized control algorithms that globally stabilize the desired Nash equilibrium. The novel approach is to exploit the passivity properties of the feedback loop comprising the mobiles and the base station. We first reveal an inherent passivity property in an existing gradient-type algorithm, and prove stability from the Passivity Theorem. We then exploit this passivity property to develop two new designs. In the first design, we extend the base station algorithm with Zames-Falb multipliers which preserve its passivity properties. In the second design, we broaden the mobile power update laws with more general, dynamic, passive controllers. These new designs may be exploited to enhance robustness and performance, as illustrated with a realistic simulation study. We then proceed to show robustness of these algorithms against time-varying channel gains.     

Passivity‐based asymptotic stabilization for switched nonlinear systems using the sampled integral stabilization technique

The asymptotic stabilization problem is studied for a cascade connection of passive switched nonlinear systems and a passive switched nonlinear system in this paper. When each subsystem is asymptotically zero state detectable and passive on active time intervals, asymptotic stabilization is achieved via co‐design of switching laws and controllers without damping injection. First, an output‐feedback controller is designed to asymptotically stabilize a cascade connection of two passive switched systems if outputs are measurable. Second, when the output of the first switched system is noisy or unmeasurable, a sampled integral stabilization (SIS) technique is employed to investigate asymptotical stabilization of a cascade connection by measuring only the storage function of the second switched system. Finally, as a special case of a cascade connection, the SIS technique is used to stabilize a passive switched system without damping injection. Under this circumstance, the controller is designed by sampling the integral of the passive output. The two‐link robot manipulator is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the SIS technique.