Long Actuator Delays - Extending the Smith
Predictor to Nonlinear Systems
Miroslav Krstic
Harold W. Sorenson Professor of Control Systems
Dept. of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
University of California at San Diego
La Jolla, CA
One would be hard pressed to find "long actuator delays" and
"nonlinear control" co-existing in the same sentence in the existing
control literature, which is due to the infinite dimensionality and
the potential for finite escape time instability in the underlying
problems. On the 50th anniversary of Otto Smith's invention of the
"predictor" feedback for compensating long actuator delays for linear
systems, a method that has since become one of the favorite tools in
chemical process control and many other applications, I am pleased to
present an approach for synthesizing a predictor feedback to go along
with any stabilizing nominal nonlinear controller, with actuator delay
of any length. Interestingly, Smith's idea was actually an elementary
version of "infinite dimensional backstepping," which I have been
developing over the last few years for PDE problems such as
Navier-Stokes, MHD, Euler and Timoshenko beams, and other systems in
mechanics. By employing the backstepping point of view to construct
Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals, it becomes possible to prove several
forms of robustness of predictor feedbacks, including robustness to
both underestimating and overestimating the length of the actuator
delay. The latter is a particularly subtle result because it involves
a non-standard dynamic perturbation - the controller (inadvertently)
inserts an additional infinite-dimensional state to an already
infinite-dimensional feedback loop.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
3:30 PM
Seaver Science Library, Room 150 (SSL 150)
Refreshments will be served at 3:15 pm.
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