Robust Control of Uncertain Parametric Systems

This chapter introduces how a control design problem can be formulated as an optimization problem. To this end, the standard control problem as well as the notion of stabilizing controllers are first briefly reviewed. This chapter focuses on the case of structured controllers, i.e., structural constraints have to be taken into account in the optimization problem. These structural constraints make the resulting optimization problem nonsmooth and non-convex, which result into intractability. This is why the use of stochastic optimization methods are suggested for finding an acceptable solution. The robustness issue is also briefly discussed.