Cooperative parallel operation of multiple actuators

Abstract

This paper studies parallel operation of identical actuators cooperatively driving a common plant. The objective of the parallel operation is to regulate the output of the plant accurately while allowing the actuators to fairly share the input of the plant. To address the parallel operation problem, it is assumed that the plant and the actuators are modeled by general linear systems as opposed to the existing results. Further it is assumed that the controllers for the actuators share their local information with each other through communication. A feedback control law for each actuator is proposed by using the plant output error measurement and the exchanged local information. Assuming the existence of the spanning tree in the graph representing the communication topology among the controllers, it is shown that the output regulation and plant input sharing properties can be achieved by the proposed control law. The design of the proposed control law is demonstrated by a numerical example. © 2024 Elsevier Ltd