Motion planning and control problems for underactuated robots

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in motion planning and control for underactuated robots, emphasizing geometric control theory, controllability, and oscillatory controls, while highlighting open problems and potential approaches.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent theoretical and practical developments in geometric control for underactuated robots, including controllability and oscillatory control methods.

Findings

Recent results on kinematic controllability

Advances in oscillatory control techniques

Identification of open problems and future directions

Abstract

Motion planning and control are key problems in a collection of robotic applications including the design of autonomous agile vehicles and of minimalist manipulators. These problems can be accurately formalized within the language of affine connections and of geometric control theory. In this paper we overview recent results on kinematic controllability and on oscillatory controls. Furthermore, we discuss theoretical and practical open problems as well as we suggest control theoretical approaches to them.