Stabilizing hierarchical compensation for locally controlled large flexible structures

A two-level hierarchical control strategy is proposed for large flexible space structures. The lower level consists of a set of local controllers. The higher level is a stabilizing compensator to account for any instabilities caused by controller-structure interaction with unmodeled dynamics. The advantage of this hierarchical strategy is that the lower level can be designed to meet the performance requirements, and the higher level can be designed independently to produce overall stability.