Periodic Forcing, Dynamics and Control of
Underactuated Spacecraft
and Underwater Vehicles
N.E. Leonard
In Proceedings of the 34th IEEE Conference on Decision
and Control, December 1995, p. 3980-3985.
Abstract
In this paper we describe spacecraft and underwater vehicle dynamics
with small-amplitude, periodically time-varying forcing.
The dynamic descriptions are derived so that they can be used to
prescribe forcing laws for controlling the motion
of these systems when they are underactuated, i.e., when the number of
force inputs is less than the dimension of the configuration space.
The use of periodic force inputs is motivated by the demonstrated
success
of using periodic velocity inputs in the associated nonholonomic
kinematic spacecraft and underwater vehicle motion control problems,
e.g.,
controlling
underactuated spacecraft driven with internal rotors and underwater
vehicles at low Reynolds number. By now addressing dynamic as well as
kinematic response, we provide results that are useful in many
practical
problems in which the system cannot be modelled as purely kinematic,
e.g., controlling underactuated spacecraft driven with gas
jets and underwater vehicles at high Reynolds number.
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