Performance-oriented parallel distributed compensation

The main idea of the original parallel distributed compensation (PDC) method is to partition the dynamics of a nonlinear system into a number of linear subsystems, design a number of state feedback gains for each linear subsystem, and finally generate the overall state feedback gain by fuzzy blending of such gains. A new modification to the original PDC method is proposed here, so that, besides the stability issue, the closed-loop performance of the system can be considered at the design stage. For this purpose, the state feedback gains are not considered constant through the linearized subsystems, rather, based on some prescribed performance criteria, several feedback gains are associated to every subsystem, and the final gain for every subsystem is obtained by fuzzy blending of such gains. The advantage is that, for example, a faster response can be obtained, for a given bound on the control input. Asymptotic stability of the closed loop system is also guaranteed by using the Lyapunov method. To illustrate the effectiveness of the new method, control of a flexible joint robot (FJR) is investigated and superiority of the designed controller over other existing methods is demonstrated.