Analysis and design of gain scheduled control systems

Gain scheduling, as an idea, is to construct a global feedback control system for a time varying and/or nonlinear plant from a collection of local time invariant designs. However in the absence of a sound analysis, these designs come with no guarantees on the robustness, performance, or even nominal stability of the overall gain schedule design. Such an analysis is presented for three types of gain scheduling situations: (1) a linear parameter varying plant scheduling on its exogenous parameters, (2) a nonlinear plant scheduling on a prescribed reference trajectory, and (3) a nonlinear plant scheduling on the current plant output. Conditions are given which guarantee that the stability, robustness, and performance properties of the fixed operating point designs carry over to the global gain scheduled designs, such as the scheduling variable should vary slowly and capture the plants nonlinearities. Finally, an alternate design framework is proposed which removes the slowing varying restriction or gain scheduled systems. This framework addresses some fundamental feedback issues previously ignored in standard gain.