A Method for Computing Optimal Controls for Mechanical Systems

Abstract A technique for the computation of optimal controls for a class of mechanical systems is described in this paper. It is proposed to parametrize the second derivatives of the generalized coordinates to transform the optimal control problem into a non-linearly constrained optimization problem. This is then solved using the sequential quadratic programming method. The proposed technique is particularly suitable for mechanisms consisting of rigid links, such as industrial robots. Furthermore, continuous and terminal constraints on the slate variables and controls may be easily handled. Two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.