Stabilization and Control of Mechanical Systems with Backlash

1. Introduction

Backlash is a phenomena found in different kinds of actuators such as mechanical and hydraulic, generally it occurs when the contact of two mating gears do not match and this give way to many unwanted effects provoking problems to the whole mechanical system. Thus some authors have proposed several solutions respect to the control and stability issues of these systems with input nonlinearities; taking in count that is not a trivial task due to the complexity of the model, traditional control strategies fail in most of the cases, and therefore it is necessary to design nonlinear control strategies or implement modified traditional ones. The objective of this book chapter is to explain diverse control strategies for systems with this kind of nonlinearity. The intention is to show some nonlinear control techniques that have been developed and propose different approaches to solve this problem.