Almost global stabilization of fully-actuated rigid bodies

This paper addresses the problem of stabilizing a fully-actuated rigid body. The problem is formulated by considering the natural configuration space for rigid bodies, the Special Euclidean group SE(3). The proposed solution consists of a landmark-based controller for force and torque actuation that guarantees almost global asymptotic stability of the desired equilibrium point. As such the equilibrium point is asymptotically stable and only a nowhere dense set of measure zero lies outside its region of attraction. The controller uses velocity measurements and the position coordinates of a collection of landmarks fixed in the environment. As an additional feature, the control law is designed so as to verify prescribed bounds on the actuation. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.