Recent developments in millimeter-scale fabrication processes have led to rapid progress towards creating airborne flapping wing robots based on Dipteran (two winged) insects. Previous work to regulate forces and torques generated by flapping wings has focused on controlling wing trajectory. An alternative approach uses underactuated mechanisms with tuned dynamics to passively regulate these fo...

Underactuation in robotic hands is currently attracting a lot of interest from researchers. The challenging idea of underactuation in grasping is that hands, with reduced number of actuators, supported by suitable design and control, may not suffer from reduced performances. This trend is also strengthened by recent neuroscience studies which demonstrates that also humans use sensorimotor syner...

This paper presents a practical collision-free motion planning method for general underactuated robot manipulators. First the dynamic properties of underactuated robot manipulator are analyzed, and then the collision avoidance problem is formulated and solved as a position-based force control problem. Virtual generalized force representing the intrusion of the arm into the obstacle dangerous zo...

We develop tools for studying the control of underactuated mechanical systems that evolve on a configuration space with a principal fiber bundle structure. Taking the viewpoint of affine connection control systems, we derive reduced formulations of the Levi-Civita and the nonholonomic affine connections, along with the symmetric product, in the presence of symmetries and nonholonomic constraint...

In the last decade, energy based control theory has undergone a significant breakthrough in dealing with underactated mechanical systems with two successful and similar tools, controlled Lagrangians and controlled Hamiltanians (IDA-PBC). However, because of the complexity of these tools, successful case studies are lacking, in particular, MIMO cases. The seminal theoretical paper of controlled ...

This paper studies the force capability of a particular class of underactuated fingers. Force capability is defined as the ability to create an external wrench onto a fixed object. The concept of underactuation in robotic fingers, with fewer actuators than degrees of freedom (DOF) through the use of springs and mechanical limits, allows the hand to adjust itself to an irregularly shaped object ...

This paper addresses the problem of dynamic positioning and way-point tracking of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the presence of constant unknown ocean currents and parametric modeling uncertainty. A nonlinear adaptive controller is proposed that steers an AUV along a sequence of way-points consisting of desired positions (x, y) in a inertial reference frame, followed by...

Inspired by the previous work of Aicardi et al.[1] a path following controller for underactuated planar vehicles is designed by adopting a polar-like kinematic model of the system. The solution proposed does not generally guarantee null asymptotic path following error, but only its boundedness below an adjustable upper threshold. However, knowledge of the path curvature is not necessary, thus r...

A new method for motion planning and trajectory tracking of underactuated three-link planar robots with a passive rotational third joint is proposed. One fundamental feather is to use the switching of partly stable controllers (PACs) in order to fulfill the control objective. The dynamic model of this kind of underactuated robot system is built based on Lagrange method. Different objective func...

Quad rotor is a renowned underactuated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with widespread military and civilian applications. Despite its simple structure, the vehicle suffers from inherent instability. Therefore, control designers always face formidable challenge in stabilization and control goal. In this paper fuzzy membership functions of the quad rotor’s fuzzy controllers are optimized using nat...