Robust Control of Networked Systems With Variable Communication Capabilities and Application to a Semi-Active Suspension System

This paper is concerned with a robust control problem of a class of networked systems operated within a multiple communication channels (MCCs) environment. A practical scenario is considered that the active channel in such MCCs for the data communication is switched and the switching is governed by a Markov chain. For each channel, two network-induced imperfections, time delays, and packet dropouts with different characteristics are taken into account. Suppose that the practical plant is subject to energy-bounded disturbance and norm-bounded uncertainties, a robust controller is designed to ensure that the closed-loop system is robustly stable and achieves a disturbance attenuation index against the phenomenon of channel switching. A semi-active suspension system is introduced to illustrate the effectiveness, applicability of the proposed approach, and to demonstrate the advantages of the MCCs scheme within the channel-switching framework.