Dynamics and control of mechanical systems in partly specified motion (Q679222)

The paper presents a systematic dynamic analysis and control synthesis for mechanical systems with program constraints. It is shown that the program contraints can be realized by control reactions tangential to the program constraint manifold, and this yields a very specific structure of the governing equations. The governing equations arise as differential-algebraic equations (DAEs), and the index of the DAEs may considerably exceed three. As illustrations, the author discusses DAE's with index five and index \(2n+1\), \(n=1,2,3,\dots\).