A New Exterior-point Approach to a Fixed-order Output Feedback Controller Design*

This paper deals with fixed-order controller design problems with output-feedback. It is well known that the control problems are difficult to be solved, because they become non-convex problems described by bilinear matrix inequality(BMI). In this paper, a new exterior-point approach to such BMI problems is proposed. This approach produces a controller sequence from a infeasible region to a feasible one. The advantage of this approach is that non-stabilizing controllers can be used as an initial controller. Numerical examples show the efficiency of our method.