Robust Control of a High Redundancy Actuator

The High Redundancy Actuator project deals with the construction of an actuator using many redundant actuation elements. Whilst this promises a high degree of fault tolerance, the high number of components poses a unique challenge from a control perspective. This paper shows how a simple robust controller can be used to control the system both in nominal state and after faults. To simplify the design task, the parameters of the system are tuned so that a number of internal states are decoupled from the input signal. If the decoupling is not exact, there may be small deviation from the nominal transfer function, especially when a fault has occurred. The robustness analysis ensures that the system performs well for all expected behaviour variations.