Stability of a relay dynamic system with non-linear speed sensor and delay under constant disturbance

The paper considers the joint effect of the control delay and speed sensor output signal limiting on the stability of the relay dynamic system under the constant disturbance. It is shown that in this case a new property is detected in the system – the appearance of the unstable limit cycle. Phase trajectories are drawn to a stable limit cycle only from the area of initial conditions where their boundaries are determined by the trajectory of an unstable limit cycle. Using the method of Poincare mappings, the parameters of fixed points defining the unstable limit cycle as the boundary of the stability region are found. A simplified method for approximate determination of simple limit cycles and stability in the “large” is proposed based on the property of dynamic symmetry of the system. The method allows the study of the problem under consideration to be limited to applying shift and symmetry mappings to the switching lines.

Design of active disturbance rejection controller for compass-like biped walking

This article proposes an active disturbance rejection controller design scheme to stabilize the unstable limit cycle of a compass-like biped robot. The idea of transverse coordinate transformation is applied to form the control system based on angular momentum. With the linearization approximation, the limit cycle stabilization problem is simplified into the stabilization of an linear time-invariant system, which is known as transverse coordinate control. In order to solve the problem of poor adaptability caused by linearization approximation, we design an active disturbance rejection controller in the form of a serial system. With the active disturbance rejection controller, the system error can be estimated by extended state observer and compensated by nonlinear state error feedback, and the unstable limit cycle can be stabilized. The numerical simulations show that the control law enhances the performance of transverse coordinate control.

Steinkamp's Toy Can Hop 100 Times But Can't Stand Up

We have experimented with and simulated Steinkamp's passive-dynamic hopper. This hopper cannot stand up (it is statically unstable), yet it can hop the length of a 5 m 0.079 rad sloped ramp, with n≈100 hops. Because, for an unstable periodic motion, a perturbation Δx0 grows exponentially with the number of steps (Δxn≈Δx0×λn), where λ is the system eigenvalue with largest magnitude, one expects that if λ>1 that the amplification after 100 steps, λ100, would be large enough to cause robot failure. So, the experiments seem to indicate that the largest eigenvalue magnitude of the linearized return map is less than one, and the hopper is dynamically stable. However, two independent simulations show more subtlety. Both simulations correctly predict the period of the basic motion, the kinematic details, and the existence of the experimentally observed period ∼11 solutions. However, both simulations also predict that the hopper is slightly unstable (|λ|max>1). This theoretically predicted instability superficially contradicts the experimental observation of 100 hops. Nor do the simulations suggest a stable attractor near the periodic motion. Instead, the conflict between the linearized stability analysis and the experiments seems to be resolved by the details of the launch: a simulation of the hand-holding during launch suggests that experienced launchers use the stability of the loosely held hopper to find a motion that is almost on the barely unstable limit cycle of the free device.