Flatness-based deadbeat control revisited: Robust and high-performance design for electrical drives

The present contribution introduces an extension of deadbeat control applied to flat nonlinear systems in order to make it more robust while not compromising its performance. Conventional deadbeat control is shown to be based on feedback linearization and highly sensitive to uncertainties. So far, the only remedies are to tune the deadbeat controller and the according disturbance estimator more slowly. It is shown that by using feedforward linearization instead, the parametric sensitivity is considerably reduced. A generalized controller, a mix between feedback and feedforward linearization, is proposed. The result is a deadbeat controller with both high dynamic performance and high robustness. The experimental results on an induction machine demonstrate very fast reference tracking, high robustness to typical parameter uncertainties and active compensation of time-varying disturbances.