Tracking control of a heavy chain system

This paper deals with the tracking control of a particular heavy chain system, which consists of a chain mounted onto a pivoted differential disk. To this end, the governing system of ordinary differential equations is derived and a trajectory is computed via numerical optimization. As the arising optimization problem is computationally complex, a multithreading algorithm for parallel computation of the required derivatives is presented. Furthermore, a stabilizing feedback controller, based on damping injection and an integrator backstepping approach, is derived. Finally, meansurements of a laboratory experiment show an excelent performance of the proposed control concept.