Application of Inclusion Principle to Mechanical Systems

As an attempt to simplify the decentralized control design methodology, this paper specializes the inclusion principle of Ikeda and Silják to mechanical systems. It shows that an expanded system, in a matrix second order form, can be obtained which includes the original system. Sufficient conditions and transforms of the system matrices are given to guarantee that the original system would be either an aggregation, or a restriction, of the resulting expanded system. A constructive procedure is provided to produce an expanded system which is the best approximation (in a 2-norm sense) of a presepecified structure/dynamics of the enpanded system. An example is included to illustrate the methodology.