Model predictive control of systems with deadzone and saturation

Actuator nonlinearities such as saturation and deadzone may be responsible for bad control performance, if their presence is not correctly addressed in the design of the control system. This paper focuses on a plant showing a non-symmetric deadzone and saturation of the control action. The authors implement and test two different control strategies based on Model Predictive Control (MPC): the former relies on Hybrid MPC, the latter is based on deadzone inversion and on standard MPC. The performances and the robustness of the two schemes are evaluated with simulations and with experiments on a laboratory scale overhead travelling crane.