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arXiv · 2002.08395

On the optimal control of rate-independent soft crawlers

Giovanni Colombo·Paolo Gidoni
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Abstract

Existence of optimal solutions and necessary optimality conditions for a controlled version of Moreau's sweeping process are derived. The control is a measurable ingredient of the dynamics and the constraint set is a polyhedron. The novelty consists in considering time periodic trajectories, adding the requirement that the control have zero average, and considering an integral functional that lacks weak semicontinuity. A model coming from the locomotion of a soft-robotic crawler, that motivated our setting, is analysed in detail. In obtaining necessary conditions, an improvement of the method of discrete approximations is used.

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Giovanni Colombo, Paolo Gidoni. 2020-02-19. On the optimal control of rate-independent soft crawlers. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpur.2020.11.005

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