Introduction to Passivity-Based Control

Passivity-based control (PBC) is a nonlinear control design framework that has proven adequate for controlling a wide range of systems, especially physical ones. Their main ingredients are physical quantities such as energy and dissipation, making the control design more intuitive and endowing the controllers with a physical interpretation. In contrast to other, mathematically-based nonlinear control approaches, the energy-based viewpoint and physical intuition of PBC often make this strategy more robust and energy efficient. This chapter provides an overview of PBC, revisiting the basic aspects of this powerful nonlinear control framework and the most common PBC approaches.