Experimental demonstration of reset control design

Using the describing function method, engineers in the 1950?s and 1960?s conceived of novel nonlinear compensators in an attempt to overcome the performance limitations inherent in linear time-invariant (LTI) control systems. This paper is concerned with a subset of such devices called "reset controllers" which are LTI systems equipped with mechanism and law to reset its states to zero. This paper reports on a design procedure and a laboratory experiment in which the resulting reset controller provides better tradeoffs than LTI compensation. Specifically, we show that reset control almost doubles the level of sensor-noise suppression without sacrificing either disturbance-rejection performance or gain/phase margins. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental demonstration of reset control in the literature.