Abstract Gainscheduled control is widely applied in the aerospace domain, yet the selection of design points for gainscheduling controllers to ensure stability and robustness throughout the range of scheduling variables remains theoretically unguided. Therefore, this paper introduces an analysis and optimization method for the stability and robustness of gain-scheduled control, aimed at providing a theoretical framework for design points selection. Initially, the method characterizes the gainscheduled control system as a polytopic Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) system, wherein the design points of the gainscheduled control system correspond to the vertices of the polytopic LPV system. Subsequently, the method utilizes Linear Matrix Inequality techniques to demonstrate the stability of a polytopic LPV system with a corresponding number of vertices, and by assessing the approximation degree between the polytopic LPV system and the gainscheduled control system with an identical number of design points, it evaluates and ensures the stability of the latter, thereby establishing the minimal requirements for the number of design points. After ensuring stability, the method further refines the number of design points within the gainscheduled control system to meet additional robustness and performance considerations. A case study on turbofan engine controls validates the proposed method. New design points, selected via stability and robustness analysis, enhance the system's steadystate phase margin and robustness against model uncertainties. Moreover, compared to a vgap metric-based method, the two methods exhibit similar performance in terms of stability, robustness, and tracking control. However, the proposed method requires fewer design points, resulting in less conservatism.
Read full abstract