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Underactuated mechanical systems (UMS) play an essential role in several branches of industrial activity and their application scope ranges from robotic manipulators and overhead cranes to aerospace vehicles and watercrafts. Despite this broad spectrum of applications, the problem of designing accurate controllers for underactuated systems is, however, much more tricky than for fully actuated ones. Moreover, the dynamic behavior of an UMS is frequently uncertain and highly nonlinear, which in fact makes the design of control schemes for such systems a challenge for conventional and well established methods. In this talk, it will be shown that intelligent algorithms, such as fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks, could be combined with nonlinear control techniques (feedback linearization or sliding modes) in order to improve both set-point regulation and trajectory tracking of uncertain underactuated mechanical systems.
Wallace M. Bessa (Technische Universität Hamburg)
Professor
Wallace Moreira Bessa is Professor for Applied Mechanics, on leave from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, and Research Fellow of the Brazilian National Research Council. He earned his B.Sc. degree at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, his M.Sc. degree at the Brazilian Military Institute of Engineering, and his D.Sc. degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, all in Mechanical Engineering. Currently, he is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Institute of Mechanics and Ocean Engineering of the Hamburg University of Technology. His research interests include control theory, intelligent systems, mechatronics and nonlinear dynamics. Prof. Bessa has more than 70 publications including 16 journal articles and 7 book chapters in the above mentioned research areas.