Total Energy Function with Damping Assignment (TEFDA): A novel control objective in robotics

This paper deals with control objectives with application to robotics. Automatic control systems are designed to meet desired specifications - control objectives - for the system to be considered adequately controlled. The contribution of the paper is the introduction of a new concept regarding a control objective based on: closed-loop Total Energy Function with Damping Assignment (TEFDA) which has the feature that the standard regulation control objective may also be achieved as a particular case. Potential applications of this novel TEFDA control objective are robot physical emulation, control of underactuated mechanisms, robots under actuator failures handling, and safe robot-human physical interaction.