Preface

The purpose of this book is to provide a detailed presentation of a novel block backstepping based control law that can address the control problems of a large class of underactuated mechanical systems in a generalized manner. Study of control problems of the underactuated systems and thereafter devising appropriate control actuations for those are presently being pursued with utmost vigor by the control research groups. The reason behind this is the appeal of the dynamic nature of the systems along with the challenges they pose. Such systems belong to a class that has a wide spectrum in reality not even restricting their domains related to Robotics, Aerospace, Industrial Processes, Marine systems etc. Consequently, a lot of theoretical propositions as well as practical application oriented approaches have been reported in the literature during the last few decades. Undoubtedly, those research contributions have enriched the literature of control engineering to a great extent, but quite often they fail to compromise between the theory and practice. Theoretical approaches can ensure global asymptotic stability during analysis, while their complicated mathematical formulations restrict their implementations on the practical systems in real-time. On the other hand, application-oriented approaches are absolutely system specific, and eventually they fail to answer the control problems of the other systems of similar nature. Therefore, design of a generalized control law based on block backstepping has been presented in this book in a structured manner. The theory and further employment of Block backstepping based control law has been developed in a versatile manner, so that the control action generated, thereby, can ensure global asymptotic stability for most of the underactuated mechanical systems and at the same time can guarantee a desired performance during real-time implementations. Indeed complicated state model of underactuated mechanical system restricts the straightforward applications of naïve integrator backstepping method. Therefore, the authors of this book have endeavored to establish an algebraic transformation