Slide 0 Controllability of simple mechanical control

The work presented in this talk was initiated by some work which went into my PhD disserta-tion [Lewis 1995], and has been ongoing, to some extent, ever since. The initial aim of the work was to address some of the basic nonlinear control questions in the specific context of mechan-ical systems. Although there is some fairly general work in the Hamiltonian control framework (see [Nijmeijer and van der Schaft 1990, Chapter 12]), existing work in the Lagrangian framework was ad hoc and example based. Examples commonly studied were robotic systems and satellite control. Since these systems are “simple ” (i.e., their Lagrangians are kinetic minus potential energy), as are many mechanical control systems which arise in applications, it seems reasonable to focus on this class of systems