Design of time-varying feedbacks for some mechanical systems

Pascal Morin, Control & Dynamical Systems, Caltech

The talk will present some results on the asymptotic stabilization by time-varying feedback. Two kinds of systems will be considered: non-holonomic mobile robots (car-like vehicle with trailers,...), and the under actuated spacecraft (rigid body with two control torques). From the control point of view, the first class leads to the study of driftless systems (by the kinematic equations) whereas the spacecraft is intrinsically a system with drift. We will present some design results for these systems, illustrating the fact that some of the techniques used for the stabilization of driftless systems can also be extended to the stabilization of systems with drift.