Control of high density microcantilever systems

In this paper we build on our earlier work on the control of high density, electrostatically actuated, microcantilever arrays and present simple state feedback controllers that can achieve reasonable performance. These controllers are localized, spatially distributed and yield tracking performances comparable to the performance of the distributed H∞ controller proposed in our earlier study, for reference frequencies as high as 3000 rad/sec. These simpler structures come with the cost of worse performance at higher frequencies, relatively inferior robustness to phase shifts and a state availability requirement. Therefore, it can be effectively used for relatively lower bandwidth applications where the states are measurable. The above results are further verified by using a multimodal model of the cantilever system.