Bi‐objective control design for vehicle‐mounted mobile antenna servo systems

Abstract

This paper studies a high-performance control design for the servo system of a vehicle-mounted mobile satellite communication antenna. Considering the different requirements for tracking and disturbance attenuation in the servo system, a novel controller structure consisting of a central controller and a disturbance filter is proposed. Based on this controller structure, a bi-objective control design scheme is proposed: One is an optimal tracking design for the central controller, and the other is a disturbance attenuation design for the disturbance filter. It turns out that the resulting control system achieves an optimal tracking performance when the external disturbance is at a low level; meanwhile, the system achieves a robust disturbance attenuation performance when the disturbance is significant. Moreover, considering the trade-offs between performance and the robust stability of the closed-loop system, the weighting parameter selection in control design criteria is studied for a practical application. Furthermore, validation experiments and field tests are carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of this design, and their results show that the well-designed bi-objective controller significantly improves the dynamic pointing accuracy of the antenna in tracking a geostationary satellite when its carrier is driving off-road.