Underactuated mechanical system has less independent inputs than the degrees of freedom(DOF) of the mechanism. The energy efficiency of this class of mechanical systems is an essential problem in practice. On the basis of the sufficient and necessary condition that concludes a single input nonlinear system is differentially flat, it is shown that the flat output of the single input underactuated mechanical system can be obtained by finding a smooth output function such that the relative degree of the system equals to the dimension of the state space. If the flat output of the underactuated system can be solved explicitly, and by constructing a smooth curve with satisfying given boundary conditions in flat output space, an energy efficiency optimization method is proposed for the motion planning of the differentially flat underactuated mechanical systems. The inertia wheel pendulum is used to verify the proposed optimization method, and some numerical simulations show that the presented optimal motion planning method can efficaciously reduce the energy cost for given control tasks.
The multi-modes feature, the measure of the manipulating flexibility, and self-reconfiguration control method of the underactuated redundant manipulators are investigated based on the optimizing technology. The relationship between the configuration of the joint space and the manipulating flexibility of the underactuated redundant manipulator is analyzed, a new measure of manipulating flexibility ellipsoid for the underactuated redundant manipulator with passive joints in locked mode is proposed, which can be used to get the optimal configuration for the realization of the self-reconfiguration control. Furthermore, a time-varying nonlinear control method based on harmonic inputs is suggested for fulfilling the self-reconfiguration. A simulation example of a three-DOFs underactuated manipulator with one passive joint features some aspects of the investigations.
