Robust Control of an Electromagnetic Suspension System

The electromagnetic suspension system is a motivating and inspiring project for students to investigate the primary principles of electrical engineering, such as control theory, including robust performance and modeling uncertainty. This paper studies robust control methods for an electromagnetic suspension system with H_2, H_infinity and mu-synthesis control approaches to provide robust system performance in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances. System uncertainties are critical parts of the interconnected system modeling, affecting its performance. The control methods tackle the system uncertainties, including unmodeled dynamics, parametric uncertainty, and linearization error. Robust performance analysis for all proposed control methods is provided, and closed-loop system performance is illustrated. The performance robustness is validated using illustrative simulation results.