Control Analysis and Synthesis of Linear Mechanical Descriptor Systems

Abstract

In recent years the analysis and synthesis of linear time-invariant control systems in descriptor form have been established. One important class of these systems are mechanical descriptor systems, i. e. mechanical systems with explicit holonomic and/or nonholonomic constraints. They are important for many applications such as vehicle dynamics, machine dynamics, dynamics of robots etc.. All these applications use the theory of multibody systems. If kinematic connections like joints are used or if subsystems are connected by constraints, the constraint equations may be used explicitly such that the mathematical model turns out to be with differential-algebraic equations, i. e. it is a descriptor system. This natural system description has a clear physical meaning of the descriptor states.