Dr. Masayuki Sato

The basic design technique of LPV controllers (state-feedback as well as output feedback controllers) has been almost completed in the late of 1990’s by extending H-infinity control design technique to LPV framework. However, the designed output feedback controllers are not practical if conservatism reduction is aimed with use of parameter-dependent Lyapunov functions. This is because the state-space matrices of the LPV controllers depend on not only the current scheduling parameters but also the derivatives of the scheduling parameters (continuous-time case) or one step ahead scheduling parameters (discrete-time case). In other words, the designed LPV controllers are “impractical” with respect to the implementability. Furthermore, it is implicitly supposed that precise values of scheduling parameters are available. However, in practical systems, it is very rare to obtain precise values of scheduling parameters (e.g. so-called “position errors” in airspeed with use of Pitot tubes). These issues have been overlooked from academia for a long time. This talk focuses on these implementability issues and presents controller design methods to produce practical LPV controllers with a simple application of Elimination lemma. The flight test results using the designed practical LPV controllers, in which the usefulness of the proposed method is well illustrated, are also shown.

Biography:

Dr. Masayuki Sato received Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2009. Since 1997, he has been with the National Aerospace Laboratory (presently, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) as a researcher. His research interests include robust/gain-scheduled controller design and their applications to flight controllers (in particular, flight controller design for an in-flight simulator MuPAL-a), and practical flight controller design for UAVs. He has been involved in several UAV programs (e.g. quad-tilt wing UAV, radiation monitoring UAV, solar plane, etc.) in JAXA. He played one of the PIs in ‘‘VISION’’ (Validation of Integrated Safety-enhanced Intelligent flight cONtrol) EU-JP international collaborative research project conducted from 2016 to 2019.

He serves as associated editors for several international and domestic journals. He is a member of IEEE Technology Conference Editorial Board since 2020, a member of IEEE TC on Robust and Complex Systems (TC-RoCS) since 2019 (previously, a member of IEEE TC on Systems with Uncertainty from 2011 to 2019), and a member of IFAC TC on Aerospace (TC 7.3) since 2015.