A parameter set division and switching gain-scheduling controllers design method for time-varying plants

This paper presents a new technique to design switching gain-scheduling controllers for plants with measurable time-varying parameters. By dividing the parameter set into a sufficient number of subsets, and by designing a robust controller to each subset, the designed switching gain-scheduling controllers achieve a desired L-2-gain performance for each subset, while ensuring stability whenever a controller switching occurs due to the crossing of the time-varying parameters between any two adjacent subsets. Based on integral quadratic constraints theory and Lyapunov stability theory, a switching gain-scheduling controllers design problem amounts to solving optimization problems. Each optimization problem is to be solved by a combination of the bisection search and the numerical nonsmooth optimization method. The main advantage of the proposed technique is that the division of the parameter region is determined automatically, without any prespecified parameter set division which is required in most of previously developed switching gain-scheduling controllers design methods. A numerical example illustrates the validity of the proposed technique. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.