A QFT Framework for Antiwindup Control Systems Design

The paper is devoted to the robust stability problem of linear time invariant feedback control systems with actuator saturation, especially in those cases with potentially large parametric uncertainty. The main motivation of the work has been twofold: First, most of the existing robust antiwindup techniques use a conservative plant uncertainty description, and second, previous quantitative feedback theory (QFT) results for control systems with actuator saturation are not suitable to achieve robust stability specifications when the control system is saturated. Traditionally, in the literature, this type of problems has been solved in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), using less structured uncertainty descriptions as given by the QFT templates. The problem is formulated for single input single output systems in an input-output (I/O) stability sense, and is approached by using a generic three degrees of freedom control structure. In this work, a QFT-based design method is proposed in order to solve the robust stability problem of antiwindup design methods. The main limitation is that the plant has poles in the closed left half plane, and at most, has one integrator. The work investigates robust adaptations of the Zames–Falb stability multipliers result, and it may be generalized to any compensation scheme that admits a decomposition as a feedback interconnection of linear and nonlinear blocks (Lur’e type system), being antiwindup systems as a particular case. In addition, an example will be shown, making explicit the advantages of the proposed method in relation to previous approaches.