Integral MRAC with Minimal Controller Synthesis and bounded adaptive gains: The continuous-time case

Model reference adaptive controllers designed via the Minimal Control Synthesis (MCS) approach are a viable solution to control plants affected by parameter uncertainty, unmodelled dynamics, and disturbances. Despite its effectiveness to impose the required reference dynamics, an apparent drift of the adaptive gains, which can eventually lead to closed-loop instability or alter tracking performance, may occasionally be induced by external disturbances. This problem has been recently addressed for this class of adaptive algorithms in the discrete-time case and for square-integrable perturbations by using a parameter projection strategy [1]. In this paper we tackle systematically this issue for MCS continuous-time adaptive systems with integral action by enhancing the adaptive mechanism not only with a parameter projection method, but also embedding a s-modification strategy. The former is used to preserve convergence to zero of the tracking error when the disturbance is bounded and L2, while the latter guarantees global uniform ultimate boundedness under continuous L8 disturbances. In both cases, the proposed control schemes ensure boundedness of all the closed-loop signals. The strategies are numerically validated by considering systems subject to different kinds of disturbances. In addition, an electrical power circuit is used to show the applicability of the algorithms to engineering problems requiring a precise tracking of a reference profile over a long time range despite disturbances, unmodelled dynamics, and parameter uncertainty.Postprint (author's final draft

Bibliographic Review on Distributed Kalman Filtering

In recent years, a compelling need has arisen to understand the effects of distributed information structures on estimation and filtering. In this paper, a bibliographical review on distributed Kalman filtering (DKF) is provided.\ud The paper contains a classification of different approaches and methods involved to DKF. The applications of DKF are also discussed and explained separately. A comparison of different approaches is briefly carried out. Focuses on the contemporary research are also addressed with emphasis on the practical applications of the techniques. An exhaustive list of publications, linked directly or indirectly to DKF in the open literature, is compiled to provide an overall picture of different developing aspects of this area

Robust Stability of Iterative Learning Control Schemes

A notion of robust stability is developed for iterative learning control in the context of disturbance attenuation. The size of the unmodelled dynamics is captured via a gap distance, which in turn is related to the standard H2 gap metric, and the resulting robustness certificate is qualitatively equivalent to that obtained in classical robust H∞ theory. A bound on the robust stability margin for a specific adaptive ILC design is established

A biased approach to nonlinear robust stability and performance with applications to adaptive control

The nonlinear robust stability theory of Georgiou and Smith [IEEE Trans. Automat. Control, 42 (1997), pp. 1200–1229] is generalized to the case of notions of stability with bias terms. An example from adaptive control illustrates nontrivial robust stability certificates for systems which the previous unbiased theory could not establish a nonzero robust stability margin. This treatment also shows that the bounded-input bounded-output robust stability results for adaptive controllers in French [IEEE Trans. Automat. Control, 53 (2008), pp. 461–478] can be refined to show preservation of biased forms of stability under gap perturbations. In the nonlinear setting, it also is shown that in contrast to linear time invariant systems, the problem of optimizing nominal performance is not equivalent to maximizing the robust stability margin

Robust nonlinear control of vectored thrust aircraft

An interdisciplinary program in robust control for nonlinear systems with applications to a variety of engineering problems is outlined. Major emphasis will be placed on flight control, with both experimental and analytical studies. This program builds on recent new results in control theory for stability, stabilization, robust stability, robust performance, synthesis, and model reduction in a unified framework using Linear Fractional Transformations (LFT's), Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI's), and the structured singular value micron. Most of these new advances have been accomplished by the Caltech controls group independently or in collaboration with researchers in other institutions. These recent results offer a new and remarkably unified framework for all aspects of robust control, but what is particularly important for this program is that they also have important implications for system identification and control of nonlinear systems. This combines well with Caltech's expertise in nonlinear control theory, both in geometric methods and methods for systems with constraints and saturations