Robust control of input limited smart structural systems

Integration of controllers with smart structural system require the controllers to consume less power and to be small in hardware size. These requirements pose as limits on the control input and the order of the controllers. Use of reduced order model of the plant in the controller design can cause spill over problems in the closed loop system due to possible excitation of the unmodeled dynamics. In this paper we present the design of output feedback robust controllers for smart structures in the presence of control input limits considering unmodeled dynamics as additive uncertainty in the design. The performance requirements for the design are specified as regional pole placement constraints on the closed loop poles. Formulation of this multi-objective design problem in terms of matrix inequalities resulted in a feasibility problem involving bilinear matrix inequalities (BLMIs) in the unknown variables. To facilitate the solution of this feasibility problem, a change of variables is used to convert these BLMIs into linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) which can be readily solved by the use of available tools. Finally, this design procedure is applied on a experimental smart structure and the results are presented.