Nonlinear controllers for non-integrable systems: the Acrobot example

Recent developments in the theory of geometric nonlinear control provide powerful methods for controller design for a large class of nonlinear systems. Many systems, however, do not satisfy the restrictive conditions necessary for either full state linearization [6, 5] or input-output linearization with internal stability [2]. In this paper, we present an approach to controller design based on finding a linearizable nonlinear system that well approximates the true system over a desirable region. We outline an engineering procedure for constructing the approximating nonlinear system given the true system. We demonstrate this approach by designing a nonlinear controller for a simple mechanical system patterned after a gymnast performing on a single parallel bar.