Fault accommodation in control of flexible structures

New fault-accommodating control synthesis techniques for control of flexible systems are developed. Two robust control design strategies, μ-synthesis and dissipative control design are used in the approach. The approach provides techniques for designing controllers that maximize, in some sense, the tolerance of the closed-loop system against faults in actuators and sensors, while guaranteeing performance robustness at a specified performance level, measured in terms of the proximity of the closed-loop poles to the imaginary axis (the degree of stability). For dissipative control design, nonlinear programming is employed to synthesize the controllers, whereas μ-synthesis, the traditional D-K iteration is used. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed techniques. They are applied to the control design of a flexible laboratory test structure