On the prevention of vibrations in the problem of the time-optimal control of a system with two degrees of freedom (Q6546375)

The paper considers a mechanical system consisting of two absolutely solid bodies connected by a viscoelastic rod. The movement of the system occurs along a straight line under the action of an external force acting on one of the bodies and directed along the rod. This force is assumed to be limited in absolute magnitude. Solids are modeled by point masses. The control problem is to transfer the system from a given initial state of rest to a given final state of rest. The motion of the considered mechanical system with two degrees of freedom is described by a system of linear ordinary differential equations with constant coefficients. For this system, it is possible to formulate the time-minimum problem -- the fastest transfer from a given initial state to the final one. The application of the Pontryagin's maximum principle leads to a bang-bang type solution with three control switches. However, with such time-optimal control, undesirable oscillations occur in the system, which should be avoided in real mechanical systems. \N\NThe introduction of the paper provides an exhaustive overview of the works devoted to the control of systems of this type. The authors of the paper formulate the problem of constructing such a control, which, slightly losing to the optimal performance, does not cause any significant fluctuations in the system. The control is built in the class of continuous functions. Piecewise linear functions in the form of trapezoids are accepted as such functions. An additional argument for using such control is the practical possibility of its implementation in comparison with the ``bang-bang'' type of control. The paper contains convincing numerical simulation results showing a significant reduction in undesirable vibrations of the system during movement. At the same time, the time of transferring the system from the initial position to the final one is only slightly longer than the minimum possible obtained using the Pontryagin's maximum principle. Additionally, it is established that the proposed control has noise immunity with respect to system parameters, which often cannot be precisely determined. The approach used by the authors can be used to solve various applied problems in which the exact solution of optimization problems leads to undesirable behavior of the system, while a suboptimal solution gives satisfactory results.