Performance Driven Switching Control

This paper presents a variable structure control designed to improve the behavior of the controlled variable when compared with the behavior of a fixed state feedback. The approach introduces an alternative state feedback control law and establishes a switching strategy that is guaranteed to improve performance, measured by the L ₂ norm of the controlled variable. The design of the alternative feedback offers significant flexibility; it can be, for example, an optimal regulator with very low penalty in the manipulated variable, or it can be designed to use unstable behavior to advantage. Regardless of the way the alternative control is selected, the paper shows that, in the absence of sliding mode, the switching strategy guarantees asymptotic stability of the control system