Flexible structure experiments at JPL and WPAFB - H-infinity controller designs

The authors describe some control system experiments which were carried out on flexible structure facilities at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB). They document some recent design studies for two contrasting flexible structure facilities. The first facility was the JPL/AFAL flexible antenna in Pasadena, California. The second was the WPAFB 12-meter cantilever truss in Dayton, Ohio. Each structure possessed a number of flexible modes of vibration which were lightly damped. The purpose of the experiments was to achieve active damping of the flexible modes via a digital control system. The feedback controllers were designed using the H-infinity technique of weighted gap optimization to increase the structural damping and achieve robust control.