Related papers: Quasi-static shape control of soft, morphing struc…

An experimental method has been developed to locate unstable equilibria of nonlinear structures quasi-statically. The technique involves loading a structure by application of either a force or a displacement at a main actuation point, while…

Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…

A fundamental control problem for autonomous vehicle formations is formation shape control, in which the agents must maintain a prescribed formation shape using only information measured or communicated from neighboring agents. While a…

Families of regimes for control systems are studied possessing the so called quasi-controllability property that is similar to the Kalman controllability property. A new approach is proposed to estimate the degree of transients overshooting…

This paper presents global tracking strategies for the attitude dynamics of a rigid body. It is well known that global attractivity is prohibited for continuous attitude control systems on the special orthogonal group. Such topological…

This paper examines stability properties of distance-based formation control when the underlying topology consists of a rigid graph and a flex node addition. It is shown that the desired equilibrium set is locally asymptotically stable but…

A fundamental concept in control theory is that of controllability, where any system state can be reached through an appropriate choice of control inputs. Indeed, a large body of classical and modern approaches are designed for controllable…

Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…

Quasi-periodic structures of quasicrystals yield novel effects in diverse systems. However, there is little investigation on employing quasi-periodic structures in the morphology control. Here, we show the use of quasi-periodic surface…

Topology optimization is concerned with the identification of optimal shapes of deformable bodies with respect to given target functionals. The focus of this paper is on a topology optimization problem for a time-evolving elastoplastic…

This paper extends sliding-mode control theory to nonlinear systems evolving on smooth manifolds. Building on differential geometric methods, we reformulate Filippov's notion of solutions, characterize well-defined vector fields on quotient…

We consider nonconforming methods for symmetric elliptic problems and characterize their quasi-optimality in terms of suitable notions of stability and consistency. The quasi-optimality constant is determined and the possible impact of…

In this paper we present a direct adaptive control method for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with a time-varying structure. We view the nonlinear systems as composed of a finite number of ``pieces,'' which are interpolated by…

Tailoring the design of robot bodies for control purposes is implicitly performed by engineers, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is…

This paper studies set-invariance and stabilization of hyperbolic sets over rate-limited channels for discrete-time control systems. We first investigate structural and control-theoretic properties of hyperbolic sets, in particular such…

Soft continuum robots can allow for biocompatible yet compliant motions, such as the ability of octopus arms to swim, crawl, and manipulate objects. However, current state-of-the-art continuum robots can only achieve real-time task-space…

This paper deals with the development and analysis of novel time-optimal point-to-point model predictive control concepts for nonlinear systems. Recent approaches in the literature apply a time transformation, however, which do not maintain…

Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…

The paper is concerned with an optimal control problem governed by the rate-independent system of quasi-static perfect elasto-plasticity. The objective is to optimize the stress field by controlling the displacement at prescribed parts of…

Safe and compliant control of dynamic systems in interaction with the environment, e.g., in shared workspaces, continues to represent a major challenge. Mismatches in the dynamic model of the robots, numerical singularities, and the…