Energy-based model-reduction of nonholonomic mechanical systems

Research on nonholonomic mechanical systems has focused mainly on describing geometric structure, controllability, and motion planning, yet little attention has been paid to several energy aspects of these systems. This paper describes a method to model nonholonomic mechanical systems as reduced-order port-controlled Hamiltonian systems, in which the energy structure is shown explicitly. We show how very simple equations are obtained for the example of the snakeboard, and then discuss how these equations can be used to derive an energy-based controller in an intuitive way.