LPV control of a 2-DOF robot using parameter reduction

This paper demonstrates the benefit of a new method for reducing the number of scheduling parameters of LPV controllers, by applying it to a robot manipulator. A full LPV representation of a planar two-link robot with ten scheduling parameters is considered. The number of parameters can be reduced by applying principal components analysis to typical scheduling trajectories. The proposed method enables a systematic trade-off between the number of reduced parameters and the desired accuracy of the model. The practicality of the approach is illustrated with a design example: an LPV controller, designed using a parameter reduced model, is shown in simulation studies to outperform a robust, fixed-gain controller designed to minimize the worst-case H-2 norm.