The Port-Hamiltonian Structure of Vehicle Manipulator Systems
This provides a more transparent energetic framework for robotic systems like aerial and underwater manipulators, though it is incremental as it reformulates rather than introduces new capabilities.
The paper tackles the modeling of vehicle-manipulator systems by developing a port-Hamiltonian formulation that explicitly reveals energy flow and conservation, establishing mathematical equivalence with existing Lagrangian formulations.
This paper presents a port-Hamiltonian formulation of vehicle-manipulator systems (VMS), a broad class of robotic systems including aerial manipulators, underwater manipulators, space robots, and omnidirectional mobile manipulators. Unlike existing Lagrangian formulations that obscure the underlying energetic structure, the proposed port-Hamiltonian formulation explicitly reveals the energy flow and conservation properties of these complex mechanical systems. We derive the port-Hamiltonian dynamics from first principles using Hamiltonian reduction theory. Two complementary formulations are presented: a standard form that directly exposes the energy structure, and an inertially-decoupled form that leverages the principal bundle structure of the VMS configuration space and is particularly suitable for control design and numerical simulation. The coordinate-free geometric approach we follow avoids singularities associated with local parameterizations of the base orientation. We rigorously establish the mathematical equivalence between our port-Hamiltonian formulations and existing reduced Euler-Lagrange and Boltzmann-Hamel equations found in the robotics and geometric mechanics literature.