In this paper we present a definition of "configuration controllability" for mechanical systems whose Lagrangian is kinetic energy with respect to a Riemannian metric minus potential energy. A computable test for this ...

Background and Purpose: Self-efficacy plays a major role in determining physical function during the earlier stages of the knee osteoarthritis (OA) and it may be a significant factor in the maintenance of physical function ...

Many interesting control systems are mechanical control systems. In spite of this, there has not been much effort to develop methods which use the special structure of mechanical systems to obtain analysis tools which ...

We investigate various aspects of the interplay of an affine connection with a distribution. When the affine connection restricts to the distribution, we discuss torsion, curvature, and holonomy of the affine connection. ...

Modelling and controllability studies of a hovercraft system are undertaken. The system studied is a little more complicated than some in the literature in that the inertial dynamics of the thrust fan are taken into ...

Controllability and kinematic modeling notions are investigated for a class of mechanical control systems. First, low-order controllability results are given for a class of mechanical control systems. Second, a ...

Sufficient conditions involving Lie brackets of arbitrarily high-order are obtained for local controllability of families of vector fields. After providing a general framework for the generation of high-order ...

Linearisation is a common technique in control applications, putting useful analysis and design methodologies at the disposal of the control engineer. In this paper, linearisation is studied from a differential ...

In a geometric point of view, a nonlinear control system, affine in the controls, is thought of as an affine subbundle of the tangent bundle of the state space. In deriving conditions for local controllability from ...

The maximum principle of Pontryagin is applied to systems where the drift vector field is the geodesic spray corresponding to an affine connection. The result is a second-order differential equation whose right-hand side ...