Actuator deadzone compensation: theoretical verification of an intuitive control strategy

The paper discusses the problem of actuator deadzones, and other similar nonlinearities, in otherwise linear systems. Given a linear plant, it is assumed that a nominal linear controller has been designed in ignorance of the actuator deadzone and that some form of extra compensation is needed to negate its effect. It is shown that exceptionally simple forms of add-on compensators can be used to obtain arbitrarily good performance, thereby validating a type of engineering intuition. The proposed class of compensators are also compared to the popular anti-windup compensators and the former´s superiority over the latter is demonstrated.