Gain scheduled control strategies for a nonlinear electrostatic microgripper: Design and real time implementation

This paper deals with the accurate and fast positioning control of a nonlinear electrostatically actuated microgripper. Considering the importance of nonlinearities, performances are achieved through the design of gain scheduled controllers. To this end, a nonlinear model of the studied system is proposed and is reformulated into a polynomial LPV (Linear Parameter Varying) model. Controllers are designed considering the particular polynomial parametric dependence of the LPV model. In a first instance, a controller is synthesized using an affine LPV descriptor representation of the system and LMI (Linear Matrix Inequality) constraints. In a second instance, to deal with real time implementation constraints, a second controller is designed based on an iterative procedure using the eigenstructure assignment methodology and a worst case analysis. For embedded applications, requiring simple controller structures, we show experimentally the interest of the iterative procedure which can achieve good results relatively with the ones obtained using recent advances of robust controllers based on LMI conditions.