Characteristic polynomial assignment for plants with semialgebraic uncertainty: A robust diophantine equation approach

In this paper, we address the problem of robust characteristic polynomial assignment for LTI systems whose parameters are assumed to belong to a semialgebraic uncertainty region. The objective is to design a dynamic fixed‐order controller in order to constrain the coefficients of the closed‐loop characteristic polynomial within prescribed intervals. First, necessary conditions on the plant parameters for the existence of a robust controller are reviewed, and it is shown that such conditions are satisfied if and only if a suitable Sylvester matrix is nonsingular for all possible values of the uncertain plant parameters. The problem of checking such a robust nonsingularity condition is formulated in terms of a nonconvex optimization problem. Then, the set of all feasible robust controllers is sought through the solution to a suitable robust diophantine equation. Convex relaxation techniques based on sum‐of‐square decomposition of positive polynomials are used to efficiently solve the formulated optimization problems by means of semidefinite programming. The presented approach provides a generalization of the results previously proposed in the literature on the problem of assigning the characteristic polynomial in the presence of plant parametric uncertainty. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.