Robust pole placement for plants with semialgebraic parametric uncertainty

In this paper we address the problem of robust pole placement for linear-time-invariant systems whose uncertain parameters are assumed to belong to a semialgebraic region. A dynamic controller is designed in order to constrain the coefficients of the closed-loop characteristic polynomial within prescribed intervals. Two main topics arising from the problem of robust pole placement are tackled by means of polynomial optimization. First, necessary conditions on the plant parameters for the existence of a robust controller are given. Then, the set of all admissible robust controllers is sought. Convex relaxation techniques based on sum-of-square decomposition of positive polynomials are used to efficiently solve the formulated optimization problems through semidefinite programming techniques.