Output Perfect Tracking Control for a Plant with PWM-Type Input

Abstract

It is a well-established fact that an unstable zero may appear when a minimum-phase continuous-time system is discretized by a zero-order hold. Therefore, a feedforward controller cannot be obtained based on the inverse system; this is because it becomes unstable. Herein, an exact linearization method for a continuous-time system with a pulse-width modulation-type (PWM-type) input has been proposed showing that unstable zeros of the linearized discrete-time system can be moved to the stable region by altering the pulse-centers location. This enables the construction of a stable feedforward controller that achieves an output perfect tracking control. However, the current paper shows a trade-off between the stability of the stabilized zero and the maximum pulse-width. This prevents the unstable zero from moving to a high stability region, and shows some oscillation at the output of the feedforward controller. To address this, a zero-phase error filter has been introduced to reduce the oscillation. Further, a nonlinear deadbeat controller is also proposed, which can be applied to second and higher order systems. The effectiveness of the proposed methods are presented in this paper by performing simulations.