Decentralized energy-based hybrid control for the multi-RTAC system

The concept of decentralized energy-based hybrid control involves hybrid dynamic subcontrollers with discontinuous states that individually control each subsystem of a large interconnected dynamical system. Specifically, each subcontroller accumulates the emulated energy and when the states of the subcontroller coincide with a high emulated energy level, then we can reset these states to remove the emulated energy so that the emulated energy is not returned to the subsystem. The real physical energy of each subsystem in this case is constantly dissipated through the motion of the actuators due to the subcontroller state resettings. In this paper, we specialize the general decentralized energy-based hybrid control framework to interconnected Euler-Lagrange dynamical systems and experimentally verify it on the multi-RTAC (rotational/translational proof-mass actuator) system. In addition, we discuss hardware used and experimental testbed involving three RTAC carts connected by the springs and present experimental results using decentralized energy-based hybrid controllers. This testbed presents a unique experimental platform for studying benchmark problems in decentralized nonlinear control design.