Energy shaping non-linear acceleration control for a pendulum-type mobility and experimental verification

A dynamics-based non-linear controller with energy shaping to accelerate a pendulum-type mobility is proposed. The concept of this study is to control translational acceleration of the vehicle in a dynamically reasonable manner. The body angle is controlled to maintain a reference state where the vehicle is statically unstable but dynamically stable, which leads to a constant translational acceleration due to instability of the system. The accelerating motion is like a sprinter moving from crouch start and it fully exploits dynamics of the vehicle. To achieve it, the total energy of the system is shaped to have the minimum at a given reference state and the system is controlled to converge to it. The controller can achieve various properties through the energy shaping procedure. Especially, an energy function that will lead to safe operation of the vehicle is proposed. The effectiveness of the controller is verified in simulations and experiments.