DSSynth: An Automated Digital Controller Synthesis Tool for Physical Plants

Abstract

We present an automated MATLAB Toolbox, named DSSynth (Digital-System Synthesizer), to synthesize sound digital controllers for physical plants that are represented as linear time-invariant systems with single input and output. In particular, DSSynth synthesizes digital controllers that are sound w.r.t. stability and safety specifications. DSSynth considers the complete range of approximations, including time discretization, quantization effects and finite-precision arithmetic (and its rounding errors). We demonstrate the practical value of this toolbox by automatically synthesizing stable and safe controllers for intricate physical plant models from the digital control literature. The resulting toolbox enables the application of program synthesis to real-world control engineering problems. A demonstration can be found at https://youtu.be/_hLQslRcee8.