From October 13 to 16, the 47th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON 2021) was held online. More than 2900 scholars from different countries attended the conference. The conference announced the major awards of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IEEE IES) in 2021.“Nonlinear Control of Underactuated Systems Subject to Both Actuated and Unactuated State Constraints With Experimental Verification” published by Sun Ning, Professor of the College of Artificial Intelligence at Nankai University, as a corresponding author in the top international journal IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics (IEEE TIE) received the IEEE Outstanding Paper Award for the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

The paper presents a novel control method for a kind of underactuated system, solving for the first time the closed-loop control problem considering both actuated and underactuated state constraints, giving a rigorous stability analysis, and conducting experimental tests on two typical underactuated systems, a double pendulum crane system and a tower crane system, to verify the good performance of the proposed method.

Figure: Experimental platform of two underactuated cranes to verify the proposed method

The first author of this paper is Chen He, Associate Professor of Hebei University of Technology, and the corresponding author is Professor Sun Ning of our university. Sun Ning and Chen He received their PhD degrees from Nankai University in 2014 and 2018, respectively.

(Reported by Zhou Lu and Qiao Renming, edited and translated by Nankai News Team.)