LPV control of a tensegrity-membrane system

This article presents the details of designing a linear parameter-varying (LPV) controller for a tensegrity-membrane system. The major control objective is to deploy the system from its initial packaged configuration to its final deployed configuration. Since LPV synthesis naturally leads to an infinite-dimensional linear matrix inequality (LMI) problem, a gridding method is used to reduce it to a finite-dimensional LMI problem and the control design is performed using a control-oriented model based on the linearized system dynamics at a set of system equilibriums. To test the performance of the resulting controller, a nonlinear finite element model and the control-oriented model are used in numerical simulations. To test the robustness of the controller, sensor noise is considered in another nonlinear finite element simulation and the results are compared with the simulation results given by the nominal system.