Discovering Efficient Periodic Behaviours in Mechanical Systems via
Neural Approximators
Abstract
It is well known that conservative mechanical systems exhibit local
oscillatory behaviours due to their elastic and gravitational
potentials, which completely characterise these periodic motions
together with the inertial properties of the system. The classification
of these periodic behaviours and their geometric characterisation are in
an on-going secular debate, which recently led to the so-called
eigenmanifold theory. The eigenmanifold characterises nonlinear
oscillations as a generalisation of linear eigenspaces. With the
motivation of performing periodic tasks efficiently, we use tools coming
from this theory to construct an optimization problem aimed at inducing
desired closed-loop oscillations through a state feedback law. We solve
the constructed optimization problem via gradient-descent methods
involving neural networks. Extensive simulations show the validity of
the approach.