The sealing robot must be able to calculate the slope of a contact surface for complete adherence of the sealing on different concrete shapes. After the slope is obtained, the robot will track on the surface of the concrete, but this process contains an error in the actual purpose of the force command. The reason this a phenomenon occurs, the non-linearity of the contact surface and the end-effector, is due to parasitic coupling. Errors like make it difficult to measure accurately the respective factors. Therefore, it is regarded as a disturbance that occurs when it follows the work surface it. In this paper, we selected the friction coefficient of the surface as a control factor and designed a compensator to reduce effects of disturbance. Finally, in view of the non-linearity of the end-effector of a robot to contact surfaces directly, we propose a robust force tracking controller in the finite range for managing disturbances that occur during the sealing.

This paper proposes a robust tracking control for constrained uncertain linear systems by combining a disturbance observer (DOB) and linear matrix inequality (LMI) based state feedback control. To this end, the state feedback control is designed for the nominal system and then a DOB based feed-forward control is added to reject uncertainties. In doing so, the DOB and state feedback controller are joined in a way that the combined control satisfies the input constraints and closed loop stability is guaranteed. Simulation results are provided to show that the proposed control scheme successfully stabilizes uncertain systems.

This paper proposes a robust image-based visual servoing scheme using a nonlinear observer for a monocular eye-in-hand manipulator. The proposed control method is divided into a range estimation phase and a target-tracking phase. In the range estimation phase, the range from the camera to the target is estimated under the non-moving target condition to solve the uncertainty of an interaction matrix. Then, in the target-tracking phase, the feature point uncertainty caused by the unknown motion of the target is estimated and feature point errors converge sufficiently near to zero through compensation for the feature point uncertainty.

This paper presents the design methodology of an unknown input observer for Lipschitz nonlinear systems with unknown inputs in the framework of convex optimization. We use an unknown input observer (UIO) to consider both nonlinearity and disturbance. By deriving a sufficient condition for exponential stability in the linear matrix inequality (LMI) form, existence of a stabilizing observer gain matrix of UIO will be assured by checking whether the quadratic stability margin of the error dynamics is greater than the Lipschitz constant or not. If quadratic stability margin is less than a Lipschitz constant, the coordinate transformation may be used to reduce the Lipschitz constant in the new coordinates. Furthermore, to reduce the maximum singular value of the observer gain matrix elements, an object function to minimize it will be optimally designed by modifying its magnitude so that amplification of sensor measurement noise is minimized via multi-objective optimization algorithm. The performance of UIO is compared to a nonlinear observer (Luenberger-like) with an application to a flexible joint robot system considering a change of load and disturbance. Finally, it is validated via simulations that the estimated angular position and velocity provide true values even in the presence of unknown inputs.

Using a sliding mode controller and observer techniques, this paper presents a robust current controller for a DC motor in the presence of parametric uncertainties. One of the most important issues in the practical application of sliding mode schemes is the chattering phenomenon caused by switching actions. This paper presents a novel sliding mode controller that incorporates an integral control with a sliding mode disturbance observer to attenuate the chattering by reducing the controller/observer switching gains. The proposed sliding mode disturbance observer is designed to estimate a relatively slow varying signal in the equivalent lumped disturbance owing to system uncertainties. Combining the estimated uncertainty with the sliding mode control input, the proposed controller can achieve the control objective by using the relatively low gain of the controller. The proposed disturbance observer does not include the switching control input of the baseline sliding mode controller to reduce the observer switching gain. In the proposed approach, the integral sliding mode control is used to improve the steady state control performance. Comparative computer simulations are carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Through the simulation results, the proposed controller realizes the robust performance with reduced current ripples.

A simple new sufficient condition for asymptotic stability of the positive linear time-varying discrete-time systems, with unstructured time-varying uncertainty in delayed states, is established in this paper Compared with previous results that cannot be applied to time-varying systems; the time-varying system and delay time are considered simultaneously in this paper. The proposed conditions are compared with suitable conditions for the typical discrete-time systems. The considerations are illustrated by numerical examples of previous work.

This paper introduces a stabilization condition for polynomial fuzzy systems that guarantees $H_{\infty}$ performance under the imperfect premise matching. An $H_{\infty}$ control of polynomial fuzzy systems attenuates the effect of external disturbance. Under the imperfect premise matching, a polynomial fuzzy model and controller do not share the same membership functions. Therefore, a polynomial fuzzy controller has an enhanced design flexibility and inherent robustness to handle parameter uncertainties. In this paper, the stabilization conditions are derived from the polynomial Lyapunov function and numerically solved by the sum-of-squares (SOS) method. A simulation example and comparison of the performance are provided to verify the stability analysis results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed stabilization conditions.

James C. Maxwell published a paper titled "On Governors" in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1868. However, this paper was ignored for about 80 years due to unreadability of the paper itself. In 1948, Norbert Wiener revived this paper and identified it as the first significant control theory paper, which gave Maxwell his due as the first contributor to this theory. The purpose of this article is to provide historical information on the origin of stability analysis through Maxwell's paper, and to revisit the key idea of the paper in view of the present stability theory with clear explanations. This article includes a proof and some illustrative figures of governors that were not shown in the original publication.

This paper discusses the dynamics and control problem of an overhead shuttle system (OSS), which is a critical part of the automated container terminal at a port. The main purpose of the OSS is efficient automated transport function of containers, which also requires high precision and safety. A major difference between the OSS and the conventional container crane is the configuration of the cables for hoisting the spreader. A mathematical model of the OSS is developed here for the first time, which results in an eight-pole system. Also, open loop control methods (trapezoidal and notch-type velocity profiles) are investigated so that the command input to the overhead shuttle produces the minimum possible sway of the payload. Simulation results show that the vibration suppression capability of the OSS is superior to the conventional overhead container crane, which is partially due to the cable configuration.

This paper proposes a torque control method for surface mounted permanent magnetic synchronous motor (PMSM) driven by a 2-level voltage source driven inverter, which has fast torque response and small torque ripple. The proposed torque control method follows the finite control set model predictive control (FCS-MPC) strategy. A reference state is derived at each time step for the given time varying torque reference and the cost index is defined so that the tracking error for this reference state should be penalized. The choice of an optimal output voltage vector is made first from the 6 possible active voltage vectors of the 2-level voltage source inverter. Then a modulation factor for the chosen optimal voltage vector is obtained so that the torque ripple can be reduced further. It is shown that the proposed FCS-MPC control method yields fast torque tracking response and small torque ripple through simulation and experiments.

This paper presents a composite camera calibration method to determine thermal degradation of power distribution equipment by combining an infrared (IR) camera and a color camera. A calibration jig was first constructed to match the properties of the two cameras. Our calibration and visualization techniques allow for the display of two images, one from the color camera and the other from the IR camera with different field of views (FOVs), on the screen at the same time. To confirm its validity, several case studies have been developed to analyze thermal deterioration limits of indoor and outdoor power distribution facilities.

This paper proposes a practical algorithm for the reduction of measurement errors due to drift in a micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) gyros that are used for a mobile robot. Any drift in a MEMS gyro will cause an unbounded growth of errors in the estimation of heading, which makes it nearly useless in applications that require high accuracy over a long operating time. In proposed method, maneuvers of a cleaning robot are observed through encoders' measurement process and a decision to correct bias drift will be made if necessary. The method used in this paper is called the "heading estimation filter". To evaluate the accuracy of the proposed method, a comparison was made between the estimation of the heading of the cleaning robot and one from a motion capture system.

This paper presents a simple approximation-based design approach for consensus tracking of heterogeneous second-order nonlinear systems under a directed network. All nonlinearities of followers are assumed to be unknown and non-identical. In the controller design procedure, graph-independent error surfaces are used and an unimplementable intermediate controller for each follower is designed at the first design step. Then, by adding and subtracting a graph-based term at the second step, the actual controller for each follower is designed by using one neural network employed to estimate a lumped and distributed nonlinearity. Therefore, the proposed local controller for each follower has a simpler structure than existing approximation-based consensus tracking controllers for multi-agent systems with unmatched nonlinearities.

This paper proposes a repeat-back jamming signal detection scheme that utilizes a combined pseudo random noise signal that is effective for processing a global positioning system (GPS) repeat-back jamming signal with the early minus late phase scheme to alleviate any existing multipath signal detection. The proposed scheme uses the combined pseudo random noise signal to treat repeat-back jamming signals like similar multipath signals and can effectively detect a repeat-back jamming signal by applying the early minus late phase scheme to a combined pseudo random noise signal. Through a Monte-Carlo simulation, the detection probability of the proposed scheme is better than the one of the conventional scheme under low jamming to signal power ratio.