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Robust Performance Guarantees for System Level Synthesis

We generalize the system level synthesis framework to systems defined by bounded causal linear operators, and use this parameterization to make connections between robust system level synthesis and classical results from the robust control literature. In particular, by leveraging results from L1 robust control, we show that necessary and sufficient conditions for robust performance with respect to causal bounded linear uncertainty in the system dynamics can be translated into convex constraints on the system responses. We exploit this connection to show that these conditions naturally allow for the incorporation of delay, sparsity, and locality constraints on the system responses and resulting controller implementation, allowing these methods to be applied to large-scale distributed control problems -- to the best of our knowledge, these are the first such robust performance guarantees for distributed control systems.