Abstract
This paper presents both simulation and experimental investigations into the simultaneous design of a steering wheel and its control system for vibration suppression. The research can be divided into two stages. In the first stage, the simultaneous design is formulated as a nonlinear programming problem in which the H_∞ norm of the closed-loop system is minimized with respect to both the structural and control parameters. For convenience of using existing control design tools, a nested approach in which only the structural parameters are treated as explicit design variables is used to solve the original problem. The design obtained by simultaneous optimization is compared with the original structure and the effectiveness of the simultaneous optimization is shown by simulation. In the second stage, experiments are performed to evaluate the design of simultaneous optimization. To consider the effects of modeling error and system uncertainty, μ synthesis instead of H_∞ control is adopted in the experimental evaluation. The experimental result shows that the optimized structure is still superior to the original one after the controllers are redesigned in the framework of μ synthesis.
