Robustness and performance tradeoffs in control design for flexible structures

The design of control laws for the Caltech flexible structure experiment using a nominal design model with varying levels of uncertainty is considered. A brief overview of the structured singular value (µ) H∞ control design, and µ-synthesis design techniques is presented. Tradeoffs associated with uncertainty modeling of flexible structures are discussed. A series of controllers are synthesized based on different uncertainty descriptions. It is shown that an improper selection of nominal and uncertainty models may lead to unstable or poor-performing controllers on the actual system. In contrast, if descriptions of uncertainty are overly conservative, performance of the closed-loop system may be severely limited. Experimental results on control laws synthesized for different uncertainty levels on the Caltech structure are presented