Delay-Based Controller Design for Continuous-Time and Hybrid Applications

Motivated by the availability of different types of delays in embedded systems and biological circuits, the objective of this work is to study the benefits that delay can provide in simplifying the implementation of controllers for continuous-time systems. Given a continuous-time linear time-invariant (LTI) controller, we propose three methods to approximate this controller arbitrarily precisely by a simple controller composed of delay blocks, a few integrators and possibly a unity feedback. Different problems associated with the approximation procedures, such as finding the optimal number of delay blocks or studying the robustness of the designed controller with respect to delay values, are then investigated. We also study the design of an LTI continuous-time controller satisfying given control objectives whose delay-based implementation needs the least number of delay blocks. A direct application of this work is in the sampled-data control of a real-time embedded system, where the sampling frequency is relatively high and/or the output of the system is sampled irregularly. Based on our results on delay-based controller design, we propose a digital-control scheme that can implement every continuous-time stabilizing (LTI) controller. Unlike a typical sampled-data controller, the hybrid controller introduced here -— consisting of an ideal sampler, a digital controller, a number of modified second-order holds and possibly a unity feedback -— is robust to sampling jitter and can operate at arbitrarily high sampling frequencies without requiring expensive, high-precision computation

Synthesis of embedded control systems with high sampling frequencies

Motivated by current technological advances in the design of real-time embedded systems, this work deals with the digital control of a continuous-time linear time-invariant (LTI) system whose output can be sampled at a high frequency. Since a typical sampled-data controller operating at a high sampling frequency needs heavy (high-precision) computation to alleviate its sensitivity to measurement and computational errors, the objective is to design a robust hybrid controller for high-frequency applications with limited computational power. To this end, we exploit our recent results on delay-based controller design and propose a digital-control scheme that can implement every continuous-time stabilizing (LTI) controller. This robust hybrid controller, which consists of an ideal sampler, a digital controller, a number of modified second-order holds and possibly a unity feedback, can operate at arbitrarily high sampling frequencies without requiring expensive, high-precision computation. We also discuss how to find a continuous-time LTI controller satisfying prescribed design specifications so that its corresponding digital controller requires the least processing time

A Near-Optimal Decentralized Servomechanism Controller for Hierarchical Interconnected Systems

This paper is concerned with decentralized output regulation of hierarchical systems subject to input and output disturbances. It is assumed that the disturbance can be represented as the output of an autonomous LTI system with unknown initial state. The primary objective is to design a decentralized controller with the property that not only does it reject the degrading effect of the disturbance on the output (for a satisfactory steady-state performance), it also results in a small LQ cost function (implying a good transient behavior). To this end, the underlying problem is treated in two phases. In the first step, a number of modified systems are defined in terms of the original system. The problem of designing a LQ centralized controller which stabilizes all the modified systems and rejects the disturbance in the original system is considered, and it is shown that this centralized controller can be efficiently found by solving a LMI problem. In the second step, a method recently presented in the literature is exploited to decentralize the designed centralized controller. It is proved that the obtained controller satisfies the pre-determined design specifications including disturbance rejection. Simulation results elucidate the efficacy of the proposed control law

Resource-aware motion control:feedforward, learning, and feedback

Controllers with new sampling schemes improve motion systems’ performanc

Performance Analysis of Data-Driven and Model-Based Control Strategies Applied to a Thermal Unit Model

The paper presents the design and the implementation of different advanced control strategies that are applied to a nonlinear model of a thermal unit. A data-driven grey-box identification approach provided the physically–meaningful nonlinear continuous-time model, which represents the benchmark exploited in this work. The control problem of this thermal unit is important, since it constitutes the key element of passive air conditioning systems. The advanced control schemes analysed in this paper are used to regulate the outflow air temperature of the thermal unit by exploiting the inflow air speed, whilst the inflow air temperature is considered as an external disturbance. The reliability and robustness issues of the suggested control methodologies are verified with a Monte Carlo (MC) analysis for simulating modelling uncertainty, disturbance and measurement errors. The achieved results serve to demonstrate the effectiveness and the viable application of the suggested control solutions to air conditioning systems. The benchmark model represents one of the key issues of this study, which is exploited for benchmarking different model-based and data-driven advanced control methodologies through extensive simulations. Moreover, this work highlights the main features of the proposed control schemes, while providing practitioners and heating, ventilating and air conditioning engineers with tools to design robust control strategies for air conditioning systems

A Robust Tracking Method for MIMO Uncertain Discrete-Time Systems: Mechatronic Applications

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Towards a generic optimal co-design of hardware architecture and control configuration for interacting subsystems

In plants consisting of multiple interacting subsystems, the decision on how to optimally select and place actuators and sensors and the accompanying question on how to control the overall plant is a challenging task. Since there is no theoretical framework describing the impact of sensor and actuator placement on performance, an optimization method exploring the possible configurations is introduced in this paper to find a trade-off between implementation cost and achievable performance. Moreover, a novel model-based procedure is presented to simultaneously co-design the optimal number, type and location of actuators and sensors and to determine the corresponding optimal control architecture and accompanying control parameters. This paper adds the optimization of the control architecture to the current state-of-the-art. As an optimization output, a Pareto front is presented, providing insights on the optimal total plant performance related to the hardware and control design implementation cost. The proposed algorithm is not focused on one particular application or a specific optimization problem, but is instead a generally applicable method and can be applied to a wide range of applications (e.g., mechatronic, electrical, thermal). In this paper, the co-design approach is validated on a mechanical setup

Synthesis of embedded control systems with high sampling frequencies

Motivated by current technological advances in the design of real-time embedded systems, this work deals with the digital control of a continuous-time linear time-invariant (LTI) system whose output can be sampled at a high frequency. Since a typical sampled-data controller operating at a high sampling frequency needs heavy (high-precision) computation to alleviate its sensitivity to measurement and computational errors, the objective is to design a robust hybrid controller for high-frequency applications with limited computational power. To this end, we exploit our recent results on delay-based controller design and propose a digital-control scheme that can implement every continuous-time stabilizing (LTI) controller. This robust hybrid controller, which consists of an ideal sampler, a digital controller, a number of modified second-order holds and possibly a unity feedback, can operate at arbitrarily high sampling frequencies without requiring expensive, high-precision computation. We also discuss how to find a continuous-time LTI controller satisfying prescribed design specifications so that its corresponding digital controller requires the least processing time