Section: Research Program

Model-free control

Industry is keen on simple and powerful controllers: the tuning simplicity of the classical PID controller explains its omnipresence in industrial control systems, although its performances drop when working conditions change. The last challenge we consider is to define control techniques which, instead of using sophisticated models (the development of which may be expensive), use the information contained in the output signal and its estimated derivatives, which can be regarded as “signal-based” controllers. Such design should take into account the Indicators 1 (time), 2 (complexity) and 3 (robustness).