Stabilization of a class of Hamiltonian systems with nonholonomic constraints and its experimental evaluation

In this paper we present an asymptotic stabilization procedure of nonholonomic systems which are described in generalized Hamiltonian formulae. This paper shows how to transform such systems into canonical forms with specified structure matrices via generalized canonical transformations. Then the conditions for nonsmooth Hamiltonian functions to yield asymptotically stable control systems are given with a concrete stabilization procedure. A tradeoff between the convergence rate and robustness are discussed as well. Furthermore the effectiveness of our technique is evaluated by experiments using a two-wheeled vehicle system.