Characterising the probability profile of performance degradation of a Darwin satellite controller

In this paper, a cross entropy simulation based method is used to determine the degradation of the probability of a performance metric of a robust controller exceeding its desired performance threshold level, as it degrades at regular intervals. The proposed method verified the worst case performance levels, that were determined using various existing optimisation based methods, by associating a very low, rare event, probability. An example based on the complementary sensitivity performance function of a robust controller for the 6 degree of freedom Darwin satellite model is used to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed cross entropy simulation based method.