This technical report is a preprint of an article submitted to a journal.Most current Model Reference Adaptive Control
(MRAC) methods rely on parametric adaptive elements, in
which the number of parameters of the adaptive element are
fixed a priori, often through expert judgment. An example of
such an adaptive element are Radial Basis Function Networks
(RBFNs), with RBF centers pre-allocated based on the expected
operating domain. If the system operates outside of the expected
operating domain, this adaptive element can become
non-effective in capturing and canceling the uncertainty, thus
rendering the adaptive controller only semi-global in nature.
This paper investigates a Gaussian Process (GP) based Bayesian
MRAC architecture (GP-MRAC), which leverages the power and
flexibility of GP Bayesian nonparametric models of uncertainty.
GP-MRAC does not require the centers to be preallocated, can
inherently handle measurement noise, and enables MRAC to
handle a broader set of uncertainties, including those that are
defined as distributions over functions. We use stochastic stability
arguments to show that GP-MRAC guarantees good closed loop
performance with no prior domain knowledge of the uncertainty.
Online implementable GP inference methods are compared in
numerical simulations against RBFN-MRAC with preallocated
centers and are shown to provide better tracking and improved
long-term learning.This research was supported in part by ONR MURI Grant
N000141110688 and NSF grant ECS #0846750
