Parameterization of minimal order strongly stabilizing controllers for two-link underactuated planar robot with single sensor

Abstract

This paper investigates the minimal order of strongly stabilizing controllers for a two-link planar robot moving in a vertical plane with a single actuator and sensor, focusing on stabilizing the robot around its upright equilibrium point where both links are upright. By designing an output as the horizontal displacement of a point along the second link’s straight line, existing literature demonstrates that the robot’s strong stabilization problem is equivalent to that of a fourth-order linear plant, featuring two pairs of symmetric real poles and adjustable zeros. In contrast to an existing second-order strongly stabilizing controller tailored to a pair of symmetric real zeros around the origin within a given range, this paper achieves four main contributions. First, this paper obtains a parameterization of second-order strongly stabilizing controllers allowing the positive real zero in an expanded range. Second, this paper considers the plant with a pair of symmetric real zeros around the origin, a double origin zero, and a pair of conjugate imaginary zeros in a unified manner, and presents a more general parameterization of second-order strongly stabilizing controllers accommodating these three types of zeros in a more expanded range. Third, this paper provides a necessary and sufficient condition on these zeros (equivalently, all ranges of the observation point) for the existence of a second-order strongly stabilizing controller. Fourth, this paper demonstrates that a first-order stabilizing controller does not exist for the plant, regardless of its types of zeros, confirming that the minimal order of the strongly stabilizing controllers is two. This paper obtains all feasible regions for the parameters in each parameterization by explicitly expressing the range of each parameter using inequalities in a cascade structure, which makes the inequalities easy to check and verify. The results are applicable to both the Acrobot and Pendubot. The paper validates the theoretical findings through numerical investigations and simulations.