Trajectory-tracking control from a multibody system dynamics perspective

The development of modern mechatronic systems is often driven by the desire for more efficiency and accuracy. These requirements not only result in more complex system designs, but also in the simultaneous development of improved control strategies. Therefore, control of multibody systems is an active field of research. This contribution gives an overview of recent control-related research from the perspective of the multibody dynamics community. A literature review of the research activity in the journal Multibody System Dynamics is given. Afterwards, the framework of servo-constraints is reviewed, since it is a powerful tool for the computation of a feedforward controller and it is directly developed in the multibody system dynamics community. Thereby, solution strategies for all possible system types, such as differentially flat systems, minimum phase and non-minimum phase systems are discussed. Selected experimental and simulation results are shown to support the theoretical results.