Swing Amplitude Control of a Two-link Brachiating Robot using a Hybrid Controller

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a “hybrid”controller for better regulation of the swing up behavior of a two degree of freedom brachiating robot. In this controller, a previous “target dynamics” controller and a mechanical energy regulator are combined in a suitable fashion. The proposed controller guarantees the boundedness of the total energy of the system. Moreover, numerical simulations as well as experiments suggest that this hybrid controller achieves much better regulation of the desired swing motion than the target dynamics method by itself.