A Comparison of Controller Designs for an Experimental Flexible Structure

This paper addresses control systems design and hardware testing for an experimental structure that displays the characteristics of a typical flexible spacecraft. The results of designing and implementing various control design methodologies are described. The merit of each design is based on its capacity for vibration suppression, its stability robustness characteristics with respect to unmodelled dynamics, and its ease of design and implementation. The design methodologies under investigation include Linear Quadratic Gaussian control, static and dynamic dissipative controls and H¿ optimal control. Among the three controllers considered, it is shown, through computer simulation and laboratory experiments on the evolutionary structure, that the dynamic dissipative controller gave the best results in terms of vibration suppression and robustness with respect to modeling errors.