Constrained motion is of paramount importance in the design and analysis of mechanical systems and central to the study of analytical dynamics. The problem of constrained motion was first posed over two hundred years ago, and it has been worked on vigorously ever since. This book offers a fresh approach to the subject. Eminently readable, it is written as an introduction to analytical dynamics, with emphasis on fundamental concepts in mechanics. The connection between generalized inverses of matrices and constrained motion is a central theme. The book begins with a description of the motion of a particle subjected to holonomic and nonholonomic constraints and presents explicit equations of motion. Examples are provided throughout the book, and carefully formulated problems at the end of each chapter reinforce the material covered. This computationally appealing approach will be useful to students in engineering and the applied sciences.
Based on recent results from analytical dynamics, this paper develops a class of tracking controllers for controlling general, nonlinear, structural and mechanical systems. Unlike most control methods that perform some kind of linearization and/or nonlinear cancellation, the methodology developed herein views the nonlinear control problem from a different perspective. This leads to a simple and new control methodology that is capable of 'exactly' maintaining the nonlinear system along a certain trajectory, which, in general, may be described by a set of differential equations in the observations/measurements. The approach requires very little computation compared with standard approaches. It is therefore useful for online real-time control of nonlinear systems. The methodology is illustrated with two examples.
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