Robust fixed-structure controller synthesis

The ability to develop an integrated control system design methodology for robust high performance controllers satisfying multiple design criteria and real world hardware constraints constitutes a challenging task. The increasingly stringent performance specifications required for controlling such systems necessitates a trade-off between controller complexity and robustness. The principle challenge of the minimal complexity robust control design is to arrive at a tractable control design formulation in spite of the extreme complexity of such systems. Hence, design of minimal complexity robust controllers for systems in the face of modeling errors has been a major preoccupation of system and control theorists and practitioners for the past several decades.; Although the theory for designing linear output feedback controllers is quite mature, the actual solution of the design equations can be a daunting task. This becomes even more difficult if an optimal reduced-order controller is sought. In this dissertation, we develop a general fixed-structure control design framework that addresses the following paradigm: Minimize control law complexity subject to the achievement of a specified accuracy in the face of a specified level of uncertainty.; The control law complexity is minimized by developing a decentralized static output feedback formulation for fixed-structure controller synthesis. The decentralized static output feedback formulation captures a large class of controller architectures within a common framework and allows a common numerical algorithm to be used for computational purposes.