Robust Control: Systems With Uncertain Physical Parameters (Communications and Control Engineering)

Many plants have large variations in operating conditions. To ensure smooth running it is essential to find a simple fixed gain controller that guarantees rapidly decaying and well-damped transients for all admissible operating conditions. Robust Control presents design tools, developed by the authors, for the solution of this design problem. Examples of simple and complex cases such as a crane, a flight control problem and the automatic and active four-wheel steering of a car illustrate the use of these tools. This book is intended for anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in feedback control systems and who seeks an advanced treatment of robust control with applications. Drawing on the resources and authoritative research of a leading aerospace institute, it will mainly be of interest to mechanical and electrical engineers in universities, institutes and industrial research centres. New results, fresh ideas and new applications in automotive and flight control systems are presented in this second edition of Robust Control. The book presents parametric methods and tools for the simultaneous design of several representative operating conditions and several design specifications in the time and frequency domains. It also covers methods for robustness analysis that guarantee the desired properties for all possible values of the plant uncertainty. A lot of practical application experience enters into the case studies of driver support systems that avoid skidding and rollover of cars, automatic car steering systems, flight controllers for unstable aircraft and engine-out controllers. The book also shows the historic roots of the methods, their limitations and research needs in robust control This mechanical engineering text has been designed for those with an understanding of feedback control systems, who seek an advanced treatment of robust control with applications. Case studies are used throughout the text to illustrate the use of control design tools.