Publications Details
Building a modular robot control system using passivity and scattering theory
This paper analyses the problems and presents solutions for building a modular robot control system. The approach requires modeling the entire robot system using multi-dimensional passive networks, breaking the system into subnetwork ``modules,`` and then discretizing the subnetworks, or n-ports, in a passivity preserving fashion. The main difficulty is the existence of ``algebraic loops`` in the discretized system. This problem is overcome by the use of scattering theory, whereby the inputs and outputs of the n-ports are mapped into wave variables before being discretized. By first segmenting the n-ports into nonlinear memoryless subnetworks and linear dynamic subnetworks and then discretizing using passivity preserving techniques such as Tustin`s method, a complete modular robot control solution is obtained.