Robust Sinusoidal Tracking of High Performance Torsional Plants

In this paper, we study the tracking performance of a torsion disk system where the plant is required to track a triangular-type command signal with a small steady state error and delay. We investigate the tracking performance of the traditional inner/outer loop approach and underline its limitations in high performance applications. We then design a more advanced controller using the mixed sensitivity robust control approach and show that the tracking performance of the system can be improved substantially. The success of the design, even for the case of lightly damped plants such as the one considered in this paper, is largely the result of the proper weights selection used in the mixed sensitivity design. The main contribution of this paper is, therefore, the development of design guidelines for the weights selection when accurate tracking of periodic reference signals are desired.