Practical Universal Tracking With Pivoted Unidirectional Actuation

TL;DR

This paper develops a practical control method for robotic vehicles with pivoted unidirectional actuators, adapting robust controllers to work with actuator constraints and demonstrating effectiveness through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a control redesign that makes robust controllers compatible with pivoted unidirectional actuators, ensuring practical tracking guarantees.

Findings

Control law successfully adapts to pivoted actuators

Guarantees are practically recovered for baseline controllers

Simulation results validate the approach

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of tracking control for robotic vehicles equipped with pivoted unidirectional actuators. Starting from a baseline robust controller that assumes unconstrained inputs, we redesign the control law to be compatible with the pivoted actuator. This is accomplished by driving the output of the pivoted actuator to a ball centered at the target input value. The guarantees for the baseline controller are recovered in a practical sense. The theory is illustrated with simulation examples.