DECENTRALIZED CONTROL OF LARGE FLEXIBLE STRUCTURES BY JOINT DECOUPLING

This paper presents a novel method to design decentralized controllers for large complex flexible structures by using the idea of joint deco upling. Decoupling of joint degrees of freedom from the interior degre es of freedom is achieved by setting the joint actuator commands to ca ncel the internal forces exerting on the joint degrees of freedom. By doing so, the interactions between substructures are eliminated. The g lobal structure control design problem is then decomposed into several substructure control design problems. Control commands for interior a ctuators are set to be localized state feedback using decentralized ob servers for state estimation. The proposed decentralized controllers c an operate successfully at the individual substructure level as well a s at the global structure level. Not only control design but also cont rol implementation is decentralized. A two-component mass-spring-dampe r system is used as an example to demonstrate the proposed method.