Redundant nonholonomic mechanical systems: simulation studies

Colbaugh, Trabatti and Glass (1998) explored of the extent to which various structural properties present in nonholonomic mechanical systems can be exploited to resolve some of the difficulties which arise. Toward this end, they introduced a definition of kinematic redundancy which seems both natural and useful when applied to nonholonomic mechanical systems, and they identified some of the properties which result because of the presence of redundancy. In this paper, the authors illustrate the characterization and control schemes for redundant nonholonomic systems presented in the previous work, through a number of simulation studies in which the kinematic redundancy is used both to simplify the control problem and to enhance system performance