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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/R15504/01
Title: Robust Nonlinear Optimal Control
Principal Investigator: Vinter, Professor RB
Other Investigators:
Limebeer, Professor D
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Organisation: Imperial College London
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 October 2001 Ends: 31 March 2003 Value (£): 154,847
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Control Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Aerospace, Defence and Marine Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
In space navigation, missile guidance, flight mechanics and related areas, standard controller design procedures make use of a local dynamic model, obtained by linearising the system dynamics about a nominal trajectory. The nominal trajectory is taken to be the solution to an optimal control problem, reflecting the economic objectives of the mission. Traditional design procedures suffer from a lack of co-ordination between nominal trajectory selection and feedback design. Selection of the nominal trajectory via performance index tuning is in effect an extra, and under-utilised, 'degree of freedom' in design, which can be exploited to improve the robustness properties of the feedback controller. We propose a new, systematic design methodology for nominal trajectories to ensure that modelling errors and disturbances can be more effectively countered by local linear feedback. The idea is to introduce a sensitivity term into the performance index, which can be tuned to strike the right balance between the minimising the original performance index and robustness. We expect significant improvements on currently available design methods, particularly in future applications to complex, multi-degree of freedom mechanical systems, where it is no longer feasible to try to improve robustness properties of the overall controller scheme by trial and error adjustment of the performance index.
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Organisation Website: http://www.imperial.ac.uk