Output feedback control of a mechanical system using magnetic levitation

This paper presents an application of a nonlinear magnetic levitation system to the problem of efficient active control of mass-spring-damper mechanical systems. An output feedback control scheme is proposed for reference position trajectory tracking tasks on the flexible mechanical system. The electromagnetically actuated system is shown to be a differentially flat nonlinear system. An extended state estimation approach is also proposed to obtain estimates of velocity, acceleration and disturbance signals. The differential flatness structural property of the system is then employed for the synthesis of the controller and the signal estimation approach presented in this work. Some experimental and simulation results are included to show the efficient performance of the control approach and the effective estimation of the unknown signals.