Proposal of updating final-state control and its application to a connection control problem

This paper discusses an improvement of final-state control (FSC). FSC is a control method for transferring the state of a dynamic system to specified states at a specified terminal time by using an external input. So far, it is mainly applied to motion control problems such as servo control of hard disk drives. However, FSC cannot deal with time-varying specified states. For example, when an operator pushes a cart and attempts to connect with another stopped cart without any stop, the stopped cart should accelerate to the same velocity as the running cart within a specified time. Here, the velocity of the running cart is time-varying, and a control method which can deal with such time-varying specified states is required. In this paper, in order to deal with the time-varying states, an updating final-state control (UFSC) technique is introduced. UFSC updates the initial and ideal final states at every sample. However, the equation of UFSC algorithm includes inverse matrix computations and the computation process is complicated. Moreover, most computed inputs will not be applied because of updating. So, in order to reduce the computational load, this paper also introduces a device to extract the requisite computation for simple controlled models. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulations in a case of connection control problem of two carts.