Emulating time varying nonlinear uncertainties and disturbances in linear time invariant systems

An approach allowing the creation of parameter uncertainties and external disturbances without any hardware parts supplementary to the nominal system is proposed in this manuscript. The emulating signal, reflecting the plant variations, essential for testing of controllers, is created in software and added to the plant input, forcing the nominal system output to resemble the output of a system with actual uncertainties and disturbances, thus allowing us to test the controller's robustness prior to an actual field test. In addition, the full state vector of the emulated system may be reconstructed and fed back to the controller, if necessary. The proposed methods allow simultaneous emulation of any combination of time-varying parameter variations and external disturbances. The method can be related to a class of enhanced hardware-in-the-loop simulations, since the nominal hardware is present in the setup in addition to the controller under test. The proposed techniques can be used to test the performance of advanced control algorithms before their mass production. Extended simulation results are reported to confirm the feasibility of the proposed approaches.