Observer‐based H ∞ output tracking control for networked control systems

SUMMARY This paper is concerned with observer‐based H  ∞  output tracking control for networked control systems. An observer‐based controller is implemented through a communication network to drive the output of a controlled plant to track the output of a reference model. The inputs of the controlled plant and the observer‐based tracking controller are updated in an asynchronous way because of the effects of network‐induced delays and packet dropouts in the controller‐to‐actuator channel. Taking the asynchronous characteristic into consideration, the resulting closed‐loop system is modeled as a system with two interval time‐varying delays. A Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, which makes use of information about the lower and upper bounds of the interval time‐varying delays, is constructed to derive a delay‐dependent criterion such that the closed‐loop system has a desired H  ∞  tracking performance. Notice that a separation principle cannot be used to design an observer gain and a control gain due to the asynchronous inputs of the plant and the controller. Instead, a novel design algorithm is proposed by applying a particle swarm optimization technique with the feasibility of the stability criterion to search for the minimum H  ∞  tracking performance and the corresponding gains. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by an example. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.