Performance improvement of robust controllers for polynomially uncertain systems

This paper is concerned with the high-performance robust control of discrete-time linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with semi-algebraic uncertainty regions. It is assumed that a robustly stabilizing static controller is given whose gain depends polynomially on the uncertain variables. The problem of tuning this parameter-dependent gain with respect to a prescribed quadratic cost function is formulated as a sum-of-squares (SOS) optimization. This method leads to a near-optimal controller whose performance is better than that of the initial controller. It is shown that the results derived in the present work encompass the ones obtained in a recent paper. The efficacy of the results is elucidated by an example. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.