Sensor placement for flexible wing shape control

In a series of recent papers, shape control of a flexible plate through piezoceramic actuation has been presented. In that work, full-state feedback was assumed. In this paper, we move to sensor placement for design of an observer. Piezoceramic actuators and sensors for strain and velocity will be used. We will compare the performance of three systems: one with a distribution of sensors based on predictions of high strain regions based on elasticity theory; another with sensors placed manually based on bending gain features; and a third with sensors placed using the centroidal Voronoi tesselation with functional gains as placement weights. We compare the effectiveness of the systems in achieving a desired tip position in the presence of disturbances.