Disturbance Model Identification and Model Free Synthesis of Controllers for Multivariable Systems

Abstract

In this work, two different problems are addressed. In the first part, the problem of synthesizing a set of stabilizing controllers for unknown multivariable systems using direct data is analyzed. This is a model free approach to control design and uses only the frequency domain data of the system. It is a perfect complement to modern and post modern methods that begin the control design with a system model. A three step method, involving sequential design, search for stability boundaries and stability check is proposed. It is shown through examples that a complete set of stabilizing controllers of the chosen form can be obtained for the class of linear stable multivariable systems. The complexity of the proposed method is invariant with respect to the order of the system and increases with the increase in the number of input channels of the given multivariable system. The second part of the work deals with the problem of identification of model uncertainties and the effect of unwanted exogenous inputs acting on a discrete time multivariable system using its output information. A disturbance model is introduced which accounts for the system model uncertainties and the effect of unwanted exogenous inputs acting on the system. The frequency content of the exogenous signals is assumed to be known. A linear dynamical model of the disturbance is assumed with an input that has the same frequency content as that of the exogenous input signal. The extended model of the system is then subjected to Kalman filtering and the disturbance states estimates are used to obtain a least squares estimate of the disturbance model parameters. The proposed approach is applied to a linear multivariable system perturbed by an exogenous signal of known frequency content and the results obtained depict the efficacy of the proposed approach.