International Journal of Control, Vol.64, No.1, 9-27, 1996
H-Infinity Control of Systems with Compensators Which Read the Command Signal
This paper investigates H-infinity control design where the compensator is assumed to have immediate access to the command signal (usually denoted by W-1) but not to the disturbance signal (denoted by W-2). While the Doyle-Glover paradigm feeds only a plant output Y into the compensator, in many industrial applications the command signal at time t can be transmitted to the compensator at time t if there is any advantage to doing so. In this article we analyse both linear and nonlinear systems and find that the advantage of this control architecture is great. The results in this paper generalize those of Ball et al. (1993), Doyle et al. (1988) and Helton et al. (1992). A necessary condition is given for the general nonlinear systems. These suggest formulas for controllers. For special cases such as when there is no disturbance signal W-2 or the system is linear, we have very satisfactory conclusions. In particular, for linear systems with uncertainty, we derive conditions for the solution of the robust H-infinity control problem to exist.