Video and Webinar Series

Robust Control

This video series covers a high-level introduction to robust control. The goal is to get you up to speed with some of the terminology and to give you a better understanding of what robust control is and how it fits into the larger control field. 

We’ll cover how a robust system is capable of meeting requirements (usually stability or performance measures) even in the presence of model or disturbance uncertainty.

We’ll introduce disk margin and show how it can be a better representation of how robust your system is to uncertainty versus classical gain and phase margins. We’ll take that one step further and show that disk margin is also a more accurate measurement for MIMO systems.

Uncertainty isn’t always lumped at the inputs or outputs of the plant, so this series also covers how to model and quantify plant uncertainty at the component level or frequency level. Once we have an accurate model of uncertainty, we will look at control techniques that produce a robust system design. By the end of the series, we’ll walk through an example of a robust control design. 

What Is Robust Control? This video covers a high-level introduction to robust control. The goal is to get you up to speed with some of the terminology and to give you a better understanding of what robust control is and how it fits into the larger control field.

Understanding Disk Margin This video explains what disk margin is, why it might be a better representation of how much margin your system has over something like classical gain and phase margins, and how to interpret the results.

Disk Margins for MIMO Systems This video shows how margin can be used to assess the robustness of multi-input, multi-output systems. We’ll show how disk margin is a more complete way to represent margin for MIMO systems over classical gain and phase margin.

Working with Parameter Uncertainty This video covers how we can quantify system robustness by applying variation to the individual parameters within the model to determine how robust the system is to parameter uncertainty.

H Infinity and Mu Synthesis This video goes through a robust controller design for an active suspension system. We start with H infinity synthesis to design a controller for a nominal plant model and then expand on that concept to design a robust controller using mu synthesis.