RADIAL BASIS FUNCTION NETWORK ARCHITECTURE FOR NONHOLONOMIC MOTION PLANNING AND CONTROL OF FREE-FLYING MANIPULATORS

This paper considers a problem of nonholonomic motion planning. A prac tical paradigm for planning and stabilization of motion in a class of multivariate nonlinear (nonholonomic) systems is presented and applied to a planar free-floating manipulator system. The controller architec ture designed in the paper is based on the radial basis Function appro ximation of an optimal control program for any desired motion. This ar chitecture also incorporates a sampled-data feedback stabilization alg orithm, The proposed control technique overcomes certain problems asso ciated with other control approaches available for nonholonomic system s. The presented simulation results reveal a promising potential of th e proposed control paradigm. This paradigm can be extended to a broade r class of nonlinear control problems.