Integrated Closed-Loop Modal Truncation and Balanced LQG Control Synthesis for Vibration Control of Flexible Payloads

This paper addresses the problem of vibration control of arbitrary flexible payloads using a smart robotic gripper comprised of actuating fingers and non-contact proximity sensors coupled to controllers. In order to the obtain an accurate reduced-order model of flexible payload and a low-order vibration suppression controller for it, this paper theoretically investigates two important questions pertaining to the selection of vibration: 1) Which modes are dominant (or important) ones in closed-loop? 2) How many of these dominant modes should be retained for control design? A new integrated design methodology is proposed that provides answers to these questions. The methodology finds, in closed-loop, the minimum number of dominant vibration modes to be retained and balanced LQG controller/estimator gains that meet a given set of closed-loop performance specifications - simultaneously.