A Measurement Oriented Formulation of the Dynamics of Natural and Robotic Systems
A measurement oriented formulation of rigid body dynamics is applied to a special class of planar linkage systems. It leads to a diagonal moment of inertia matrix, and thus simplifies the feedforward computations in the controller. On the other hand, if measurements are not available or measurements are not allowed, the computational burden shifts to the feedback computation of the generalized or internal forces. This formulation may find applications in off-line digital computer simulations and on-line control of the rigid body systems via the inverse dynamics methods. It may also underly computations in natural and biological systems that are rich with sensory modalities and processes. The computational burden in this model is shifted from the inverse of moment of inertia matrix to the derivation of the forces of constraint, contact, connection, internal or generalized. When these forces are available from measurements, the computations are indeed reduced and consequently on-line control problems are rendered easier. As a consequence of this representation the problems of transmission delay, and predictive compensation become important as is shown via an example. The investigation of the range of intermediate representations where computations and measurements are combined remains a fertile subject.