A criterion for optimal sensor placement for minimizing spillover effects on optimal controllers

Optimal control techniques (LQG, H∞, etc.) offer several advantages for active vibration control, such as possibility of trade-off between achievable vibration attenuation and required control inputs, simultaneous suppression of multiple modes, unified and systematic controller design procedure for MIMO systems. However, a major limitation in their application has been the phenomena of spillover. For optimal controllers robustness to spillover is achieved by rolling-off controller response. In this paper, a novel criterion of sensors placement to minimize roll-off requirement, for given actuator locations, is proposed. As an illustration H∞ control is applied for suppressing first two modes of a slewing spacecraft. Comparison of results obtained for sensor location based on proposed criterion with those of collocated sensor location showed: (a) for a given controller order, performance characteristics similar to collocated control with improved robustness to spillover can be obtained by using the proposed criterion of sensor placement; (b) with proposed placement criterion robustness to spillover can be maintained with lower order controller as compared with the minimum controller order required for collocated control.