Antiwindup design with guaranteed regions of stability: an LMI-based approach

This note addresses the design of antiwindup gains for obtaining larger regions of stability for linear systems with saturating inputs. Considering that a linear dynamic output feedback has been designed to stabilize the linear system (without saturation), a method is proposed for designing an antiwindup gain that maximizes an estimate of the basin of attraction of the closed-loop system. It is shown that the closed-loop system obtained from the controller plus the antiwindup gain can be modeled by a linear system with a deadzone nonlinearity. A modified sector condition is then used to obtain stability conditions based on quadratic Lyapunov functions. Differently from previous works these conditions are directly in linear matrix inequality form. Some numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design technique when compared with the previous ones.