Coordinated motion control of networked mechanical systems

This paper investigates the coordinated tracking control problem for the networked mechanical systems. Firstly, we consider the tracking control problem for the networked mechanical systems with a virtual structure. Under the condition that only a subset of the follower mechanical systems have access to the states of the target or control system, we further study the cooperative tracking control problem with a leader-follower structure. Finally, the distributed tracking controller design problem without relative velocity measurements is investigated. The development in this paper is suitable for the general directed communication topology, which is only required to have a spanning tree. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.