Environmental Adaptive Control of a Snake-like Robot With Variable Stiffness Actuators

This work investigates adaptive stiffness control and motion optimization of a snake-like robot with variable stiffness actuators. The robot can vary its stiffness by controlling magnetorheological fluid(MRF) around actuators. In order to improve the robot's physical stability in complex environments, this work proposes an adaptive stiffness control strategy. This strategy is also useful for the robot to avoid disturbing caused by emergency situations such as collisions. In addition, to obtain optimal stiffness and reduce energy consumption, both torques of actuators and stiffness of the MRF braker are considered and optimized by using an evolutionary optimization algorithm. Simulations and experiments are conducted to verify the proposed adaptive stiffness control and optimization methods for a variable stiffness snake-like robots.

Nonlinear oscillations with parametric excitation solved by homotopy analysis method

An analytical technique, namely the homotopy analysis method （HAM）, is used to solve problems of nonlinear oscillations with parametric excitation. Unlike perturbation methods, HAM is not dependent on any small physical parameters at all, and thus valid for both weakly and strongly nonlinear problems. In addition, HAM is different from all other analytic techniques in providing a simple way to adjust and control convergence region of the series solution by means of an auxiliary parameter h. In the present paper, a periodic analytic approximations for nonlinear oscillations with parametric excitation are obtained by using HAM, and the results are validated by numerical simulations.

Robust Fault Detection and Isolation Based on Finite-frequency H__/H_∞ Unknown Input Observers and Zonotopic Threshold Analysis

This work proposes a robust fault detection and isolation scheme for discrete-time systems subject to actuator faults,in which a bank of H_/H∞ fault detection unknown input observers(UIOs) and a zonotopic threshold analysis strategy are considered. In observer design, finite-frequency H_ index based on the generalized Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov lemma and H∞ technique are utilized to evaluate worst-case fault sensitivity and disturbance attenuation performance, respectively. The proposed H_/H∞ fault detection observers are designed to be insensitive to the corresponding actuator fault only, but sensitive to others.Then, to overcome the weakness of predefining threshold for FDI decision-making, this work proposes a zonotopic threshold analysis method to evaluate the generated residuals. The FDI decision-making relies on the evaluation with a dynamical zonotopic threshold. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed scheme.