Disturbance accommodating control for completely unknown persistent disturbances

The problem of reducing the effect of an unknown disturbance on a dynamical system is one of the most fundamental issues in control design. Persistent disturbances in a large space structure (LSS) will drastically affect the operation of that system under stringent operating specifications unless the controller can be designed to counteract such disturbances. We present a technique for disturbance counteraction using the new idea of a state estimator design for unknown inputs. This disturbance counteraction controller will reduce the disturbance effect on a structure in the presence of unknown disturbances. We illustrate this with a flexible robot manipulator database