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The work presented here proposes a novel strategy for characterizing the kinetics of a single robot as a team of agents working concurrently to satisfy a set of performance objectives. This approach enables the design and application of multi-agent control algorithms across robot subsystems in an effort to create control architectures that are inherently resilient to subsystem failure. A holonomic drive omnidirectional robot is analyzed using the proposed methodology. Each actuator subsystem is treated as an individual agent in a team that contributes to the robot’s coordinated motion. We generalize the approach for various classes of omnidirectional drive vehicles and demonstrate how to characterize the forces and moments associated with each subsystem. Validation is performed to demonstrate that the proposed approach yields robot motion models that are in agreement with those found by conventional rigid-body planar motion analysis.

An actuator jam failure is mitigated using a servomechanism formulation where the failed control surface is modeled as an exogenous input to the degraded plant. The approach exploits switching control, linear output regulation, H2 control theory, and an outer-loop PI control algorithm to track a desired reference input. Application is demonstrated using the nonlinear NASA AirSTAR Generic Transport Model (GTM).

Many gun launched projectiles spin to maintain in-flight dynamic stability. This spinning often induces the gyroscopic phenomenon known as precession, or coning. Coning poses a problem for actively controlling the projectile. A control scheme is proposed that can compensate for the coning angle of the projectile and allow front-mounted canards to efficiently change the projectile flight path without reaching a stall condition. Closed-loop regulation and H 2 control theories are employed to construct the controller.