Practice ArticleRobust structured controllers for piezoelectric microactuators

•New control scheme which incorporates the concept of shaping filter and ν-gap metric.•The control scheme includes a robust structured controller of PID type.•This work is related to the control of microactuators for fast and precise positioning systems.•The constrained non-convex optimization problem is solved via the heuristic Kalman algorithm.•Experimental results validate the proposed technique on a piezoelectric microactuator.

This paper introduces a new control scheme which incorporates the concept of shaping filter together with the use of the ν-gap metric and the robust design of a structured controller. The main motivation in doing this is related to the development of efficient control laws for small size actuators. Designing a structured controller is known to be computationally intractable via the traditional H∞ method. This is mainly due to the non-convexity of the resulting control problem which is of fixed order or structure type. To solve this kind of control problem easily and directly, without using any complicated mathematical manipulations and without using too many “user defined” parameters, we utilize the heuristic Kalman algorithm (HKA) for the resolution of the underlying constrained non-convex optimization problem. The experimental results validate the proposed technique and demonstrate its convenience for the development of fast and precise positioning systems.