Sufficient Dilated LMI Conditions for Static Output Feedback Robust Stabilization of Linear Continuous-Time Systems

New sufficient dilated linear matrix inequality (LMI) conditions for the ∞ static output feedback control problem of linear continuous-time systems with no uncertainty are proposed. The used technique easily and successfully extends to systems with polytopic uncertainties, by means of parameter-dependent Lyapunov functions (PDLFs). In order to reduce the conservatism existing in early standard LMI methods, auxiliary slack variables with even more relaxed structure are employed. It is shown that these slack variables provide additional flexibility to the solution. It is also shown, in this paper, that the proposed dilated LMI-based conditions always encompass the standard LMI-based ones. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the merits of the proposed method

Robust control of uncertain systems: H2/H∞ control and computation of invariant sets

This thesis is mainly concerned with robust analysis and control synthesis of linear time-invariant systems with polytopic uncertainties. This topic has received considerable attention during the past decades since it offers the possibility to analyze and design controllers to cope with uncertainties. The most common and simplest approach to establish convex optimization procedures for robust analysis and synthesis problems is based on quadratic stability results, which use a single (parameter-independent) Lyapunov function for the entire uncertainty polytope. In recent years, many researchers have used parameter-dependent Lyapunov functions to provide less conservative results than the quadratic stability condition by working with parameterized Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs), where auxiliary scalar parameters are introduced. However, treating the scalar parameters as optimization variables leads to large computational complexity since the scalar parameters belong to an unbounded domain in general. To address this problem, we propose three distinct iterative procedures for H2 and H∞state feedback control, which are all based on true LMIs (without any scalar parameter). The first and second procedures are proposed for continuous-time and discrete-time uncertain systems, respectively. In particular, quadratic stability results can be used as a starting point for these two iterative procedures. This property ensures that the solutions obtained by our iterative procedures with one step update are no more conservative than the quadratic stability results. It is important to emphasize that, to date, for continuous-time systems, all existing methods have to introduce extra scalar parameters into their conditions in order to include the quadratic stability conditions as a special case, while our proposed iterative procedure solves a convex/LMI problem at each update. The third approach deals with the design of robust controllers for both continuous-time and discrete-time cases. It is proved that the proposed conditions contain the many existing conditions as special cases. Therefore, the third iterative procedure can compute a solution, in one step, which is at least as good as the optimal solution obtained using existing methods. All three iterative procedures can compute a sequence of non-increasing upper bounds for H2-norm and H∞-norm. In addition, if no feasible initial solution for the iterative procedures is found for some uncertain systems, we also propose two algorithms based on iterative procedures that offer the possibility of obtaining a feasible initial solution for continuous-time and discrete-time systems, respectively. Furthermore, to address the problem of analysis of H∞-norm guaranteed cost computation, a generalized problem is firstly proposed that includes both the continuous-time and discrete-time problems as special cases. A novel description of polytopic uncertainties is then derived and used to develop a relaxation approach based on the S-procedure to lift the uncertainties, which yields an LMI approach to compute H∞-norm guaranteed cost by incorporating slack variables. In this thesis, one of the main contributions is to develop convex iterative procedures for the original non-convex H2 and H∞ synthesis problems based on the novel separation result. Nonlinear and non-convex problems are general in nature and occur in other control problems; for example, the computation of tightened invariant tubes for output feedback Model Predictive Control (MPC). We consider discrete-time linear time-invariant systems with bounded state and input constraints and subject to bounded disturbances. In contrast to existing approaches which either use pre-defined control and observer gains or optimize the volume of the invariant sets for the estimation and control errors separately, we consider the problem of optimizing the volume of these two sets simultaneously to give a less conservative design.Open Acces

Fixed-order Controller Design of Linear Systems

The problem of fixed-order dynamic output feedback control of systems subject to polytopic uncertainties is a challenging issue in the community of robust control theory. Various LMI-based methods have been developed since the last decade. In this report, we show that most of slack-matrix based methods in the literature implicitly/explicitly rely on the concept of Strictly Positive Realness (SPRness) of transfer functions presented by KYP Lemma. In fact

Observer based active fault tolerant control of descriptor systems

The active fault tolerant control (AFTC) uses the information provided by fault detection and fault diagnosis (FDD) or fault estimation (FE) systems offering an opportunity to improve the safety, reliability and survivability for complex modern systems. However, in the majority of the literature the roles of FDD/FE and reconfigurable control are described as separate design issues often using a standard state space (i.e. non-descriptor) system model approach. These separate FDD/FE and reconfigurable control designs may not achieve desired stability and robustness performance when combined within a closed-loop system.This work describes a new approach to the integration of FE and fault compensation as a form of AFTC within the context of a descriptor system rather than standard state space system. The proposed descriptor system approach has an integrated controller and observer design strategy offering better design flexibility compared with the equivalent approach using a standard state space system. An extended state observer (ESO) is developed to achieve state and fault estimation based on a joint linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach to pole-placement and H∞ optimization to minimize the effects of bounded exogenous disturbance and modelling uncertainty. A novel proportional derivative (PD)-ESO is introduced to achieve enhanced estimation performance, making use of the additional derivative gain. The proposed approaches are evaluated using a common numerical example adapted from the recent literature and the simulation results demonstrate clearly the feasibility and power of the integrated estimation and control AFTC strategy. The proposed AFTC design strategy is extended to an LPV descriptor system framework as a way of dealing with the robustness and stability of the system with bounded parameter variations arising from the non-linear system, where a numerical example demonstrates the feasibility of the use of the PD-ESO for FE and compensation integrated within the AFTC system.A non-linear offshore wind turbine benchmark system is studied as an application of the proposed design strategy. The proposed AFTC scheme uses the existing industry standard wind turbine generator angular speed reference control system as a “baseline” control within the AFTC scheme. The simulation results demonstrate the added value of the new AFTC system in terms of good fault tolerance properties, compared with the existing baseline system