A Family of Asymptotically Stable Tracking Control Laws for Flexible Robots

A general family of asymptotically stabilizing tracking control laws is introduced for a class of nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. The inherent passivity property of this class of systems ad the passivity theorem are used to show the closed-loop input/output stability which is then related to the internal state space stability through an observability condition. Applications of these results include fully actuated robots, flexible joint robots, and robots with link flexibility.<>