NONSMOOTH STRUCTURED CONTROL DESIGN

Feedback controllers with specific structure arise frequently in applications because they are easily apprehended by design engineers and facilitate onboard implementations and re-tuning. This work is dedicated to H∞-synthesis with structured controllers. In this context, straightforward application of traditional synthesis techniques fails, which explains why only a few ad-hoc methods have been developed over the years. In response, we propose a systematic way to design H∞-optimal controllers with fixed structure using local optimization techniques. We apply non-smooth optimization techniques to compute locally optimal solutions. See the paper full version (Apkarian et al. 2007) for more details and applications discussed at length.