Integrated plant and controller design of a combine harvester system

This article proposes a plant and controller design method based on performance analysis of a header height control problem on a combine harvester. The achievable bandwidth was found to be limited by the under-actuated and non-collocated features of the mechanical structure, and a parameter optimization is then applied to solve this problem by improving the property of open loop zeros and poles. H_∞ controller design is used to achieve the best performance with the considerations of tracking bandwidth, disturbance rejection and control energy. The simulation results show that this approach can obtain relatively high closed loop bandwidth which surpasses the bandwidth limitation of the original plant. The simulation of tracking comparison also shows that the integrated plant and controller design generate a superior system response.