Design of State-Feedback Controllers for Linear Parameter Varying Systems Subject to Time-Varying Input Saturation

All real-world systems are affected by the saturation phenomenon due to inherent physical limitations of actuators. These limitations should be taken into account in the controller’s design to prevent a possibly severe deterioration of the system’s performance, and may even lead to instability of the closed-loop system. Contrarily to most of the control strategies, which assume that the saturation limits are constant in time, this paper considers the problem of designing a state-feedback controller for a system affected by time-varying saturation limits with the objective to improve the performance. In order to tie variations of the saturation function to changes in the performance of the closed-loop system, the shifting paradigm is used, that is, some parameters scheduled by the time-varying saturations are introduced to schedule the performance criterion, which is considered to be the instantaneous guaranteed decay rate. The design conditions are obtained within the framework of linear parameter varying (LPV) systems using quadratic Lyapunov functions with constant Lyapunov matrices and they consist in a linear matrix inequality (LMI)-based feasibility problem, which can be solved efficiently using available solvers. Simulation results obtained using an illustrative example demonstrate the validity and the main characteristics of the proposed approach.