Bergerman, M.; Lee, C.; Xu, Y. "Dynamic coupling of
underactuated manipulators."
Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Conference on Control Applications, Albany,
USA, September 1995, pp. 500-505.
In recent years, researchers have been dedicated to the
study of underactuated manipulators which have more
joints than control actuators. In previous works,
assumptions were made as to the existence of enough
dynamic coupling between the active and the passive joints
of the manipulator, for it to be possible to control the
position of the passive joints via the dynamic coupling. In
this work, the authors aim to develop an index to measure
the dynamic coupling, so as to address when control of the
underactuated system is possible, and how the motion and
robot configuration can be designed. We discuss
extensively the nature of the dynamic coupling and of the
proposed coupling index, and their applications in the
analysis and design of underactuated systems, and in
control and planning of robot motion configuration.