Passivity-Based Control of Mechanical Systems

Abstract : Stabilization of mechanical systems by shaping their energy function is a well-established technique whose roots date back to the work of Lagrange and Dirichlet. Ortega and Spong in 1989 proved that passivity is the key property underlying the stabilization mechanism of energy shaping designs and the, now widely popular, term of passivity-based control (PBC) was coined. In this chapter, we briefly recall the history of PBC of mechanical systems and summarize its main recent developments. The latter includes: (i) an explicit formula for one of the free tuning gains that simplifies the computations, (ii) addition of PID controllers to robustify and make constructive the PBC design and to track ramp references, (iii) use of PBC to solve the position feedback global tracking problem, and (iv) design of robust and adaptive speed observers.