Robust Tracking Control for Nonlinear Systems: Performance optimization via extremum seeking

This paper presents a controller design and optimization framework for nonlinear dynamic systems to track a given reference signal in the presence of disturbances when the task is repeated over a finite-time interval. This novel framework mainly consists of two steps. The first step is to design a robust linear quadratic tracking controller based on the existing control structure with a Youla-type filter tilde Q. Secondly, an extra degree of freedom: a parameterization in terms of tilde Q, is added to this design framework. This extra design parameter is tuned iteratively from measured tracking cost function with the given disturbances and modeling uncertainties to achieve the best transient performance. The proposed method is validated with simulation placed on a Furuta inverted pendulum, showing significant tracking performance improvement.