Recursive matrix equations for kinematics and dynamics analysis of a 4-DOF parallel manipulator with a passive constraining leg and revolute actuators are presented in this paper. The prototype of this robot is a spatial mechanism, which has two translation degrees of freedom and also two rotation degrees of freedom. The manipulator consists of a base platform, a moving platform and a system of...

Applying methods of artificial evolution to synthesize robot controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging endeavor. We report an approach which might have the potential to improve the performance of evolutionary algorithms in the context of evolutionary robotics. We apply a controller concept that is inspired by signaling networks in unicellular organisms. The implementation is based on...

A novel materials handling system is being developed at CarnegieMellon University's Mechanical EngineeringDepartment. This systems contains an array of cells, each of which has two actuators. The two actuators are orthogonally oriented motorized roller wheels which, in combination, can generate a vector of motion in any planar direction. This work develops control laws for transporting and mani...

Control of permanent magnetic actuators is not an easy task because of the presence of the nonlinear quadratic terms of the currents. In order to achieve a suitable controlled dynamics canceling the effect of the nonlinearity, a new control strategy has been conceived. The proposed strategy combines the geometric eigenvector concept through a pre-compensation action and a Model Predictive Contr...

Fast ships are of increasing importance. At high speed vertical accelerations can have negative effects. By means of submerged actuators vertical accelerations can be alleviated. A good control must be designed, to move these actuators in the most effective way. It is not easy to optimise this design. A simulation environment has been developed, for an easy study of control alternatives. The si...

In this paper, a novel method for designing a model-based two-degree-of-freedom control structure for high speed position control of large deformable mirrors with voice coil actuators is presented. Both global feedforward and glocal (decentralized accounting for global dynamics) feedback control is included allowing for separately designing tracking performance and disturbance rejection. The mo...

This article presents a simulation-based strategy for sizing the actuators of a redundantly actuated robotic mechanism. The class of robotic mechanisms we consider may contain one or more closed loops and possess an arbitrary number of active and passive joints, and the number of actuators may exceed themechanism’s kinematic degrees of freedom. Our approach relies on a series of dynamic simulat...

This paper discusses in details a control design approach for hysteretic systems with dynamics. The framework is quite general to embrace several unconventional actuators. In particular, we here propose a method which allows the exploitation of the particular hysteresis characteristic of a specific class of actuators based on magnetic shape memory alloys, namely the so-called push-push actuator...

It is well known that three momentum wheel actuators can be used to control the attitude of a rigid spacecraft and that arbitrary reorientation maneuvers of the spacecraft can be accomplished using smooth feedback. If failure of one of the momentum wheel actuators occurs, we demonstrate that two momentum wheel actuators can be used to control the attitude of a rigid spacecraft and that arbitrar...

For a vehicle equipped with active single-wheel steering, brake, drive and suspension systems a nonlinear vehicle model is presented. On the basis of this model an integrated vehicle dynamics control is developed comprising all of the mentioned chassis actuators to control the plane vehicle motion. The basic control strategy consists in two parts. One part is a flatness based tracking controlle...