On Controller Design for Systems on Manifolds in Euclidean Space

Abstract: A new method is developed to design controllers in Euclidean space for systems defined on manifolds. The idea is to embed the state-space manifold $M$ of a given control system into some Euclidean space $\mathbb R^n$, extend the system from $M$ to the ambient space $\mathbb R^n$, and modify it outside $M$ to add transversal stability to $M$ in the final dynamics in $\mathbb R^n$. Controllers are designed for the final system in the ambient space $\mathbb R^n$. Then, their restriction to $M$ produces controllers for the original system on $M$. This method has the merit that only one single global Cartesian coordinate system in the ambient space $\mathbb R^n$ is used for controller synthesis, and any controller design method in $\mathbb R^n$, such as the linearization method, can be globally applied for the controller synthesis. The proposed method is successfully applied to the tracking problem for the following two benchmark systems: the fully actuated rigid body system and the quadcopter drone system.