Digital passivity-based control of underactuated mechanical systems

Most sensors and controllers are discrete-time devices, which may have a detrimental impact on the performance of continuous-time control laws, even leading to unstable behaviors. This paper proposes a sampled-data passivity-based control approach that solves the regulation problem for discrete-time underactuated mechanical systems. Moreover, in contrast to other discrete-time controllers for these systems, the proposed control design method does not require the solution of partial differential equations. To illustrate the approach, we consider three case studies with computational details and simulations.