Joel Ferguson

Joel Ferguson, Alejandro Donaire, Romeo Ortega et al.

Interconnection and damping assignment, passivity-based control (IDA-PBC) has proven to be a successful control technique for the stabilisation of many nonlinear systems. In this paper, we propose a method to robustify a system which has been stabilised using IDA-PBC with respect to constant, matched disturbances via the addition of integral action. The proposed controller extends previous work on the topic by being robust against the damping of the system, a quantity which may not be known in many applications.

Joel Ferguson, Alejandro Donaire, Richard H. Middleton

In this paper we present a method for the addition of integral action to non-passive outputs of a class of port-Hamiltonian systems. The proposed integral controller is a dynamic extension, constructed from the open loop system, such that the closed loop preserves the port-Hamiltonian form. It is shown that the controller is able to reject the effects of both matched and unmatched disturbances, preserving the regulation of the non-passive outputs. Previous solutions to this problem have relied on a change of coordinates whereas the presented solution is developed using the original state vector and, therefore, retains its physical interpretation. In addition, the resulting closed loop dynamics have a natural interpretation as a Control by Interconnection scheme.

Joel Ferguson, Alejandro Donaire, Romeo Ortega et al.

In this paper we present a method to robustify energy-shaping controllers for port-Hamiltonian (pH) systems by adding an integral action that rejects unknown additive disturbances. The proposed controller preserves the pH structure and, by adding to the new energy function a suitable cross term between the plant and the controller coordinates, it avoids the unnatural coordinate transformation used in the past. This paper extends our previous work by relaxing the requirement that the systems Hamiltonian is strictly convex and separable, which allows the controller to be applied to a large class of mechanical systems, including underactuated systems with non-constant mass matrix. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed integral action control is robust against unknown damping in the case of fully-actuated systems.

Joel Ferguson, Alejandro Donaire, Richard H. Middleton

In this paper we present an energy shaping control law for set-point regulation of the Chaplygin sleigh. It is well known that nonholonomic mechanical systems cannot be asymptotically stabilised using smooth control laws as they do no satisfy Brockett's necessary condition for smooth stabilisation. Here, we propose a discontinuous control law that can be seen as a potential energy shaping and damping injection controller. The proposed controller is shown to be robust against the parameters of both the inertia matrix and the damping structure of the open-loop system.

Joel Ferguson, Alejandro Donaire, Christopher Renton et al.

In this paper a method of controlling nonholonomic systems within the port-Hamiltonian (pH) framework is presented. It is well known that nonholonomic systems can be represented as pH systems without Lagrange multipliers by considering a reduced momentum space. Here, we revisit the modelling of these systems for the purpose of identifying the role that physical damping plays. Using this representation, a geometric structure generalising the well known chained form is identified as \textit{chained structure}. A discontinuous control law is then proposed for pH systems with chained structure such that the configuration of the system asymptotically approaches the origin. The proposed control law is robust against the damping and inertial of the open-loop system. The results are then demonstrated numerically on a car-like vehicle.

Anders Christensen, Joel Ferguson, Simón Ramírez Amaya

Recent efforts have been very successful in accurately mapping welfare in datasparse regions of the world using satellite imagery and other non-traditional data sources. However, the literature to date has focused on predicting a particular class of welfare measures, asset indices, which are relatively insensitive to short term fluctuations in well-being. We suggest that predicting more volatile welfare measures, such as consumption expenditure, substantially benefits from the incorporation of data sources with high temporal resolution. By incorporating daily weather data into training and prediction, we improve consumption prediction accuracy significantly compared to models that only utilize satellite imagery.

Joel Ferguson, Alejandro Donaire, Romeo Ortega et al.

In this paper, we present a method of applying integral action to enhance the robustness of energy shaping controllers for underactuated mechanical systems with matched disturbances. Previous works on this problem have required a number of technical assumptions to be satisfied, restricting the class of systems for which the proposed solution applies. The design proposed in this paper relaxes some of these technical assumptions.