Design of robust structurally constrained controllers for MIMO plants with time-delays

International audience— The structurally constrained controller design problem for linear time invariant neutral and retarded time-delay systems (TDS) is considered in this paper. The closed-loop system of the plant and structurally constrained controller is modelled by a system of delay differential algebraic equations (DDAEs). A robust controller design approach using the existing spectrum based stabilisation and the H-infinity norm optimisation of DDAEs has been proposed. A MATLAB based tool has been made available to realise this approach. This tool allows the designer to select the sub-controller input-output interactions and fix their orders. The results obtained while stabilising and optimising two TDS using structurally constrained (decentralised and overlapping) controllers have been presented in this paper

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

Design of robust structurally constrained controllers for MIMO plants with time-delays

International audience— The structurally constrained controller design problem for linear time invariant neutral and retarded time-delay systems (TDS) is considered in this paper. The closed-loop system of the plant and structurally constrained controller is modelled by a system of delay differential algebraic equations (DDAEs). A robust controller design approach using the existing spectrum based stabilisation and the H-infinity norm optimisation of DDAEs has been proposed. A MATLAB based tool has been made available to realise this approach. This tool allows the designer to select the sub-controller input-output interactions and fix their orders. The results obtained while stabilising and optimising two TDS using structurally constrained (decentralised and overlapping) controllers have been presented in this paper

On optimal predefined-time stabilization

This paper addresses the problem of optimal predefined-time stability. Predefined-time stable systems are a class of fixed-time stable dynamical systems for which the minimum bound of the settling-time function can be defined a priori as an explicit parameter of the system. Sufficient conditions for a controller to solve the optimal predefined-time stabilization problem for a given nonlinear system are provided. These conditions involve a Lyapunov function that satisfies a certain differential inequality for guaranteeing predefined-time stability. It also satisfies the steady-state Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation for ensuring optimality. Furthermore, for nonlinear affine systems and a certain class of performance index, a family of optimal predefined-time stabilizing controllers is derived. This class of controllers is applied to optimize the sliding manifold reaching phase in predefined time, considering both the unperturbed and perturbed cases. For the perturbed case, the idea of integral sliding mode control is jointly used to ensure robustness. Finally, as a study case, the predefined-time optimization of the sliding manifold reaching phase in a pendulum system is performed using the developed methods, and numerical simulations are carried out to show their behavior

Correct-By-Construction Control Synthesis for Systems with Disturbance and Uncertainty

This dissertation focuses on correct-by-construction control synthesis for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) under model uncertainty and disturbance. CPSs are systems that interact with the physical world and perform complicated dynamic tasks where safety is often the overriding factor. Correct-by-construction control synthesis is a concept that provides formal performance guarantees to closed-loop systems by rigorous mathematic reasoning. Since CPSs interact with the environment, disturbance and modeling uncertainty are critical to the success of the control synthesis. Disturbance and uncertainty may come from a variety of sources, such as exogenous disturbance, the disturbance caused by co-existing controllers and modeling uncertainty. To better accommodate the different types of disturbance and uncertainty, the verification and control synthesis methods must be chosen accordingly. Four approaches are included in this dissertation. First, to deal with exogenous disturbance, a polar algorithm is developed to compute an avoidable set for obstacle avoidance. Second, a supervised learning based method is proposed to design a good student controller that has safety built-in and rarely triggers the intervention of the supervisory controller, thus targeting the design of the student controller. Third, to deal with the disturbance caused by co-existing controllers, a Lyapunov verification method is proposed to formally verify the safety of coexisting controllers while respecting the confidentiality requirement. Finally, a data-driven approach is proposed to deal with model uncertainty. A minimal robust control invariant set is computed for an uncertain dynamic system without a given model by first identifying the set of admissible models and then simultaneously computing the invariant set while selecting the optimal model. The proposed methods are applicable to many real-world applications and reflect the notion of using the structure of the system to achieve performance guarantees without being overly conservative.PHDMechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145933/1/chenyx_1.pd

On Control and Estimation of Large and Uncertain Systems

This thesis contains an introduction and six papers about the control and estimation of large and uncertain systems. The first paper poses and solves a deterministic version of the multiple-model estimation problem for finite sets of linear systems. The estimate is an interpolation of Kalman filter estimates. It achieves a provided energy gain bound from disturbances to the point-wise estimation error, given that the gain bound is feasible. The second paper shows how to compute upper and lower bounds for the smallest feasible gain bound. The bounds are computed via Riccati recursions. The third paper proves that it is sufficient to consider observer-based feedback in output-feedback control of linear systems with uncertain parameters, where the uncertain parameters belong to a finite set. The paper also contains an example of a discrete-time integrator with unknown gain. The fourth paper argues that the current methods for analyzing the robustness of large systems with structured uncertainty do not distinguish between sparse and dense perturbations and proposes a new robustness measure that captures sparsity. The paper also thoroughly analyzes this new measure. In particular, it proposes an upper bound that is amenable to distributed computation and valuable for control design. The fifth paper solves the problem of localized state-feedback L2 control with communication delay for large discrete-time systems. The synthesis procedure can be performed for each node in parallel. The paper combines the localized state-feedback controller with a localized Kalman filter to synthesize a localized output feedback controller that stabilizes the closed-loop subject to communication constraints. The sixth paper concerns optimal linear-quadratic team-decision problems where the team does not have access to the model. Instead, the players must learn optimal policies by interacting with the environment. The paper contains algorithms and regret bounds for the first- and zeroth-order information feedback

Recent Advances in Robust Control

Robust control has been a topic of active research in the last three decades culminating in H_2/H_\infty and \mu design methods followed by research on parametric robustness, initially motivated by Kharitonov's theorem, the extension to non-linear time delay systems, and other more recent methods. The two volumes of Recent Advances in Robust Control give a selective overview of recent theoretical developments and present selected application examples. The volumes comprise 39 contributions covering various theoretical aspects as well as different application areas. The first volume covers selected problems in the theory of robust control and its application to robotic and electromechanical systems. The second volume is dedicated to special topics in robust control and problem specific solutions. Recent Advances in Robust Control will be a valuable reference for those interested in the recent theoretical advances and for researchers working in the broad field of robotics and mechatronics