Some Constrained Control Problems with Applications in Industrial Engineering

Handling constraints in control system design is an important issue in most, if not all, real world problems. On the other hand, it is generally true that higher levels of performance are associated with operating on, or near, constraint boundaries. Thus, a designer really cannot ignore constraints without incurring a performance penalty. Several constrained control problems have been treated in this thesis. In the framework of linear systems with saturating actuators three issues have been considered: unbounded invariant strips and stabilization by means of linear feedbacks, robust stabilization via sliding mode control, explicit characterization of null controllable regions. Moreover an optimal control problem for cooperative multi robot localization in the presence of energy constraints has been studied.