Predictive control of discrete-time high-order fully actuated systems with application to air-bearing spacecraft simulator

This paper addresses an output tracking problem for discrete-time high-order fully actuated (DHOFA) systems and its application in the control of air-bearing spacecraft (ABS) simulator. A HOFA system model, as a novel system representation, is applied to establish the dynamics of discrete-time control systems. Accordingly, a HOFA predictive control scheme is presented to deal with this problem, which is composed of a HOFA feedback for stabilization and a HOFA predictive control for tracking. In this scheme, a Diophantine equation is exploited to construct an incremental HOFA (IHOFA) prediction model to substitute a reduced-order prediction model, and then a cost function involving tracking performance is minimized by using multi-step output predictions. A sufficient and necessary condition is proposed to discuss the stability and tracking performance of the closed-loop DHOFA systems, it is simple to utilize in system analysis and extend in practice. Two experiments of the control of ABS simulator are shown to illustrate the feasibility of the presented HOFA predictive control scheme. (c) 2023 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.