Minimum time Pulse Response Based Control of flexible structures

This paper presents the pulse response based control method for minimum time control of structures. An explicit model of a structure is not needed for this method, because the structure is represented in terms of its measured response to pulses in control inputs. Minimum time control problems are solved by finding the minimal number of time steps for which a control history exists that consists of a train of pulses, satisfies input bounds, and results in desired outputs at the end of the control task. There is no modal truncation in the pulse response representation of the response, because all modes contribute to the pulse response data. The precision with which the final state of the system can be specified using pulse response based control is limited only by the observability of the system with the given set of outputs. A special algorithm for solving the numerical optimization problem arising in pulse response based control is presented, and the effect of measurement noise on the accuracy of the final predicted outputs is investigated. A numerical example demonstrates the effectiveness of pulse response based control and the algorithm used to implement it. The pulse response based control method is applied to linear problems in this paper.