Stabilization of Nonholonomic Pendulum Skate by Controlled Lagrangians

We consider the problem of stabilizing what we call a pendulum skate, a simple model of a figure skater developed by Gzenda and Putkaradze. By exploiting the symmetry of the system as well as taking care of the part of the symmetry broken by the gravity, the equations of motion are given as nonholonomic Euler–Poincaré equation with advected parameters. Our main interest is the stability of the sliding and spinning equilibria of the system. We show that the former is unstable and the latter is stable only under certain conditions. We use the method of Controlled Lagrangians to find a control to stabilize the sliding equilibrium.