Prof. Sun Ning Wins IEEE Outstanding Paper Award for the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics

The 47^th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON 2021) was held online in a virtual format from October 13 to 16. More than 2,900 scholars from across the world attended the conference, which announced the major awards of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IEEE IES) of 2021. Sun Ning, a professor at the College of Artificial Intelligence at Nankai University, received the IEEE Outstanding Paper Award for the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics as the corresponding author of the paper “Nonlinear Control of Underactuated Systems Subject to Both Actuated and Unactuated State Constraints With Experimental Verification” which was published in top international journal IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics (IEEE TIE).

This paper is dedicated to solving the common control problem of a class of underactuated systems. Underactuated systems, including all kinds of cranes, are widely used in industrial production and daily life. However, since the number of controlled variables is less than the degree of freedom, the control problem of such systems is extremely challenging. The question of how to effectively limit the motion range of the undriven state in the control process is even more difficult and remains an unresolved common problem in this domain.

To this end, a novel control method targeting a class of underactuated systems is proposed in this paper, which, for the first time, provides a solution to the closed-loop control that takes into consideration both the drivable and undrivable state constraints. In the paper, a strict stability analysis is also made for the proposed method, and experimental tests are carried out on two typical underactuated systems, namely a double pendulum crane system and a tower crane system, which verifies the superior performance of the proposed method.