The Nonlinear Control Theory of Super-articulated Mechanisms

A large body of literature has recently appeared regarding the dynamics and control of multibody systems and mixed structures. Super-articulated mechanisms are defined to be multibody systems in which the dimension of the configuration space exceeds the dimension of the control input space. The recent robotics and mechanics literature has treated numerous examples of such systems including robots with elastic joints, rotating kinematic chains, etc. This paper argues that a new paradigm for nonlinear controllability is needed to make nonlinear control theory rich enough to account for all possible modes of behavior that can be elicited in super-articulated mechanisms.