  One approach to robust control for linear plants with structured uncertainty
as well as for linear parameter-varying (LPV) plants (where the controller has
on-line access to the varying plant parameters) is through
linear-fractional-transformation (LFT) models. Control issues to be addressed
by controller design in this formalism include robust stability and robust
performance. Here robust performance is defined as the achievement of a uniform
specified $L^{2}$-gain tolerance for a disturbance-to-error map combined with
robust stability. By setting the disturbance and error channels equal to zero,
it is clear that any criterion for robust performance also produces a criterion
for robust stability. Counter-intuitively, as a consequence of the so-called
Main Loop Theorem, application of a result on robust stability to a feedback
configuration with an artificial full-block uncertainty operator added in
feedback connection between the error and disturbance signals produces a result
on robust performance. The main result here is that this
performance-to-stabilization reduction principle must be handled with care for
the case of dynamic feedback compensation: casual application of this principle
leads to the solution of a physically uninteresting problem, where the
controller is assumed to have access to the states in the artificially-added
feedback loop. Application of the principle using a known more refined
dynamic-control robust stability criterion, where the user is allowed to
specify controller partial-state dimensions, leads to correct
robust-performance results. These latter results involve rank conditions in
addition to Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) conditions.
