IMPROVED INTEGRATED STRUCTURAL CONTROL DESIGN USING COVARIANCE CONTROL PARAMETERIZATION

This paper investigates multiobjective integrated control/structure de sign using covariance control to parameterize the controller, An advan tage of this approach is that the control objectives can be specified as a set of competing analytical goals or constraints instead of a sin gle scalar cost function, From this formulation, a multiobjective nume rical optimization problem is formulated to execute the integrated con trol-structure design, The performance of this approach is investigate d on a simple disturbance rejection problem in which the control objec tives and the structural design objectives conflict. The integrated de sign optimization both increases control performance and decreases the structural mass with a counterintuitive design, In addition, these re sults add to previous work that demonstrates the potential of integrat ed design optimization of structures and controllers, It then appears that when the structure and controller are considered simultaneously, the resulting combination is an improved design. However, the extent o f the design improvement is apparently problem dependent.