Active Damping Control Design for the Mast Flight System

Design and development of the Mast Flight System for the COFS (Control of Flexible Structures) program for NASA is currently underway. An active damping controller is required to provide five percent damping for the first ten structural modes of a sixty meter truss beam structure. Two types of controller design methodologies are presented to achieve the required five percent damping. The first is an LQG controller and the second is a positive-real decentralized velocity feedback type, which is the system baseline controller design. The system modelling details are also presented which includes the models for the truss beam and the colocated actuators and sensors.