An Observer Design for Time-Delay Control and its Application to DC Servo Motor

Recently the Time Delay Control (TDC) method has been proposed as a promising technique in the robust control area, where the plants have nonlinear dynamics with parameter variations and substantial disturbances are present. TDC method, however, requires the measurements of all the state variables, together with their derivatives. This requirement imposes a severe limitation on the applications to most real systems. In order to solve this measurement problem, we proposed an observer design method that can stably reconstruct the state variables and their derivatives. Then, for a simulation study, the controller/observer based on our design method has been applied to a nonlinear plant, the result of which confirmed that the controller/observer performs satisfactorily as predicted. Finally we made experimentations on a DC servo motor that is subject to substantial amount of inertia variations and external disturbances. The results showed that the controller/observer performs quite robustly under those variations and disturbances, and is much less sensitive to sensor noise than the controller using numerical differentiations.