Uncertainty Modeling and Experiments in H 1 Control ofLarge Flexible

Approaches to uncertainty modeling for robust control of large exible space structures (LFSS) such as additive or multiplicative perturbations in H 1 do not work very well because of the special properties of LFSS dynamics. In this paper, we propose the use of a left coprime factorization (LCF) of LFSS dynamics in modal coordinates in order to get improved stability margins and performance in robust control design. The plant uncertainty is then described as stable perturbations of the coprime factors accounting for modal parameter uncertainty and unmodeled dynamics. Two multivari-able H 1 designs based on LCFs of 46 th-order colocated and noncolocated models of an LFSS experimental testbed are presented together with simulation and experimental results to illustrate the technique.