Swinging a Playground Swing: Torque Controls for Inducing Sustained Oscillations [Applications of Control]

The main goal of this article is to design torque controls for a common model of a playground swing: the model of swinging in the sitting position proposed by Case and Swanson [1], with damping added for more realism (see “Summary”). The addition of damping makes the problem much more complex from the analytic standpoint. Modeling human control of playground...