CONTROL OF A BRACHIATION ROBOT WITH A SINGLE UNDERACTUATED JOINT USING NONLINEAR MODEL PREDICTIVE CONTROL

In this paper we present the control of an underactuated brachiation robot with only one unactuated joint using the nonlinear model based predictive approach for the motion control. The robot used has 3 links, i. e., two arms and a body. We adopt the MPC to control the underactuated brachiation robot due to its advantages, mainly the construction of an optimal stabilizing control law and due to its ability to consider, in a direct way, the constraints into the optimization problem. At the end we present computational simulations with their respective results and we highlight some important considerations.