Control of high density microcantilever systems

In this paper we build on our earlier work on the control of high density, electrostatically actuated, mi-crocantilever arrays and present a simple feedforward PID controller structure that can achieve reasonable performance. This controller is decentralized, thus it does not require any information exchange between neighboring cantilever sites, and yields tracking performance comparable to the performance of the distributed H_∞ controller proposed in our earlier study, for reference frequencies as high as 3000 rad/sec. This simpler structure comes with the cost of worse performance at higher frequencies, relatively inferior robustness to phase shifts and a state availability requirement. Therefore, it can be effectively used for relatively lower bandwidth applications where the states are measurable.