Advance Control Research for Underactuated Robot Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Underactuated robot systems, with a greater number of degrees of freedom than the independent available actuators, have received abundant attention from the modern industrial field. Typical underactuated robot systems, including aircrafts, underactuated manipulators, cranes, nonholonomic mobile robots, underactuated rotorcrafts, vessels, ball and beam systems, flexible systems, Pendubot, Acrobot, and TORA systems, etc., play an increasingly important role in real-world applications with the rise of manufactures and technological developments. However, due to the underactuated property, the control difficulty of underactuated robot systems is usually high with limited research and lots of open and challenging problems remain to be solved, which is regarded as one of the most challenging topics in the nonlinear control field, since the actuated dynamics and the underactuated ones are usually nonlinearly coupled.

This Special Issue welcomes the research on the control of underactuated robot systems that could effectively improve the performance of the system by open-loop control schemes or closed-loop ones. We believe that this Special Issue will contribute a practical and comprehensive forum for exchanging novel research ideas or empirical practices that span the modeling, simulation, experiment and control of underactuated robot systems.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Designing and modeling of practical underactuated robot systems
• Trajectory planning
• Adaptive control
• Sliding mode control
• Intelligent control
• Fault diagnostics
• Other related topics on underactuated robot systems

Dr. He Chen
Dr. Yinan Wu
Dr. Yougang Sun
Guest Editors

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