An Output Regulator With Rejection of Time-Varying Disturbance: Experimental Validation on Clutch Slip Control

Time-varying disturbances may severely deteriorate control performance. For instance, the time-varying vehicle mass and the clutch friction coefficient may make automated manual transmission vehicle fail to startup on a slope. A quadratic output regulator is proposed in this brief to deal with time-varying disturbances, and the unmeasurable disturbances are estimated by a disturbance observer. To derive the control law, a novel form of multiplier function \lambda is introduced, and the control law is represented as a feedback form of the system states, the disturbances and their derivatives. The system is guaranteed to be input-to-state stable, which will significantly relax the dependence of the controller on modeling accuracy. Eventually, the proposed control law is validated on clutch slip control. Although the performance of clutch slip control is susceptible to the uncertainties in dry clutch system and the disturbances from external environment, the simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the control law is robust enough and has strong ability in rejecting time-varying disturbances, and the vehicle can be launched successfully with high performance through clutch slip control under various working scenarios.