Bi‐objective control design for vehicle‐mounted mobile antenna servo systems

This paper studies a high‐performance control design for the servo system of a vehicle‐mounted mobile satellite communication antenna. Considering the different requirements for tracking and disturbance attenuation in the servo system, a novel controller structure consisting of a central controller and a disturbance filter is proposed. Based on this controller structure, a bi‐objective control design scheme is proposed: One is an optimal tracking design for the central controller, and the other is a disturbance attenuation design for the disturbance filter. It turns out that the resulting control system achieves an optimal tracking performance when the external disturbance is at a low level; meanwhile, the system achieves a robust disturbance attenuation performance when the disturbance is significant. Moreover, considering the trade‐offs between performance and the robust stability of the closed‐loop system, the weighting parameter selection in control design criteria is studied for a practical application. Furthermore, validation experiments and field tests are carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of this design, and their results show that the well‐designed bi‐objective controller significantly improves the dynamic pointing accuracy of the antenna in tracking a geostationary satellite when its carrier is driving off‐road.