September 27, 2013, Webb 1100

Actuator saturation is one of the oldest, and most practical, problems in control.  The vast body of work in this area can be divided roughly into two groups.  The first group provides an augmentation or assistance to a high performance nominal controller when saturation is faced, but otherwise the nominal controller, that was designed without any regard to actuator limitations, is used.  The second group takes the saturation non-linearity into account, from the start, to obtain controllers that are used throughout the operation. In this talk, some of the benefits and shortcomings of each approach are discussed briefly and two techniques that attempt to combine or bridge the two general approaches are presented.  Both techniques employ a measure of scheduling to obtain a family of controllers (or anti-windup gains) that can be used depending on the level of saturation faced.  The motivation for, and the relative advantages/disadvantages of, the techniques will be discussed.

Faryar Jabbari has been on the faculty of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department of UCI since 1986. He also currently serves as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Dr. Jabbari is interested in control theory, particularly in robust and nonlinear control systems. His research efforts are focused on saturation control and control applications for combustion and fuel cell research.He is currently investigating design of controllers for systems with limited actuator capacity, with emphasis on active and hybrid control systems for earthquake engineering.In other projects, Dr. Jabbari is collaborating with Drs. Derek Dunn-Rankin and G. Scott Samuelsen in developing more effective techniques for combustion control and dynamic modeling and control of
fuel cells.