General swing-up methodology for the vertical three-link underactuated manipulator

The underactuated mechanical systems (UMS) are a special class of nonlinear systems with fewer inputs than their degree-of-freedoms (DOF). Currently the research works of such systems mainly focus on the equilibrium point stabilization and periodic trajectory tracking problem. The problem of steering a UMS to arbitrary points in its state space is hardly studied. The existing methods for the swing-up control problem of UMS mainly deal with two...