On the structure of generalized plant convexifying static control problems

This paper shows that, under specific structures of generalized plants, the set of static controllers satisfying internal stability and a certain level of H ∞ performance becomes convex. More precisely, we characterize such static H ∞ controllers by an LMI with controller variables being kept directly as decision variables. The structural conditions on the generalized plant are not too strict, and we show that generalized plants corresponding to a sort of mixed sensitivity problems indeed satisfy these conditions. For the generalized plants of interest, we further prove that full-order dynamical H ∞ controllers can be characterized by an LMI with a simple change of variables. In stark contrast to the known LMI-based H ∞ controller synthesis, the change of variables is free from the coefficient matrices of the generalized plant and this property is promising when dealing with a variety of robust control problems. Related issues such as robust controller synthesis against real parametric uncertainties are also discussed.