Efficient Computation of a Guaranteed Lower Bound on the Robust Stability Margin of Uncertain Systems

Efficient Computation of a Guaranteed Lower Bound on the Robust Stability Margin of Uncertain Systems

V. Balakrishnan and F. Wang

In IEEE Trans. Aut. Contr., AC-44(11):2185-2190, November 1999


Abstract: Sufficient conditions for the robust stability of uncertain systems, with several different assumptions on the structure and nature of the uncertainties, can be derived in a unified framework with integral quadratic constraints. These sufficient conditions, in turn, can be used to derive lower bounds on the robust stability margin for such systems. The lower bound is typically computed with a bisection scheme, with each iteration requiring the solution of a linear matrix inequality feasibility problem. We show how this bisection can be avoided altogether by reformulating the lower bound computation problem as a single generalized eigenvalue minimization problem, which can be solved very efficiently using standard algorithms. We illustrate this with several important, commonly-encountered special cases: Diagonal, nonlinear uncertainties; diagonal, memoryless, time-invariant sector-bounded (``Popov'') uncertainties; structured dynamic uncertainties; and structured parametric uncertainties. We also present a numerical example that illustrates our approach.
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