Advanced Dynamics and Control of Structures and Machines

Book excerpt: This book, intended for people in engineering and fundamental sciences, presents an integrated mathematical methodology for advanced dynamics and control of structures and machines, ranging from the derivation of models up to the control synthesis problem. This point of view is particularly useful as the physical insight and the associated structural properties, related e.g. to the Lagrangian or Hamiltonian framework, can be advantageously utilized. To this end, up to date results in disciplines like continuum mechanics, analytical mechanics, thermodynamics and electrodynamics are presented exploiting the differential geometric properties, with the basic notions of this coordinate-free approach revisited in an own chapter. In order to illustrate the proposed methodologies, several industrial applications, e.g., the derivation of exact solutions for the deformation compensation by shaped actuation in elastic bodies, or the coordination of rigid and flexible joint robots, are discussed.