In the mid sixties, Feldman (1966) reported on experiments on feedback control processes that stabilize the human arm. In a typical test, the elbow flexors (or extensors) would be loaded and the subject was asked to maintain a predetermined elbow angle. After a sudden decrease of the load, the forearm would settle at a new position. The experiments were repeated for the same initial elbow posit...

We are interested in closed loop feedback control laws for supply chains. The mathematical modeling is based on Boltzmann–type equations. These equations allow to model a supply chain with priorities. The latter influence the processing time in a nonlinear way. For this class of models we derive a control law and we show numerical results.

This paper presents a Receding Horizon Optimal Control (RHOC) scheme with zero terminal constraint, to guarantee the stability of linear 2x2 hyperbolic systems with boundary control. The boundary control problem is first reformulated into the abstract form in which the existence and the explicit formulation of the optimal control were established in the literature. These results are then applie...

There are a variety of tools for computing stabilizing feedback control laws for nonlinear systems. The diiculty is that these tools usually do not take into account the performance of the control and therefore, systematic improvement of an arbitrary stabilizing control law is extremely diicult and often impossible. The objective of this paper is to present a design algorithm that addresses thi...

This paper is concerned with control of nonholonomic systems in the presence of parametric modeling uncertainty. The specific problem considered is that of parking a wheeled mobile robot of unicycle type with unknown parameters, whose kinematics can be described by Brockett’s nonholonomic integrator after an appropriate state and control coordinate transformation. We employ the techniques of su...

An adaptive control law and a distance rate observer were developed for the lateral control of autonomous vehicles. The control law and the observer were implemented on a passenger vehicle. The test results show that both tight lateral tracking control and smooth steering can be achieved without feed forward information. The developed control law is shown to be very robust to changes in the mos...

Visual servoing methods are mmmonly classified as image based or position based, depending on whether image features or the robot pose is used in the feedback loop of the control law. Choosing one method over the other gives stability in the chosen state but surrenders all control over the other, which can lead to system failure if feature points are lost or the robot moves to the end of its re...

The elds of control and robotics are working toward the development of bipedal robots that can realize walking motions with the stability and agility of a human being. Dynamic models for bipeds are hybrid in nature. They contain both continuous and discrete elements, with switching events that are governed by a combination of unilateral constraints and impulse-like forces that occur at foot tou...

The paper discusses the problem of modelling intelligent behaviour using stochastic optimal control theory. The stochastic control solution requires state feed-back which requires vast computational resources both in terms of memory and computation. We argue that an efficient approach to this problem requires an integration of sensory and motor computation. We propose the path integral control ...

In the synthesis of control systems the dynamic properties of a closed-loop system are very important. These properties are determined by the choice of parameters of the basic control law. The article focuses on the development of the feedback, based on the implementation of the optimization approach to the problem of the best compensation effect of external disturbances.