Bayesian nonparametric adaptive control of time-varying systems using Gaussian processes

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Real-world dynamical variations make adaptive control of time-varying systems highly relevant. However, most adaptive control literature focuses on analyzing systems where the uncertainty is represented as a weighted linear combination of fixed number of basis functions, with constant weights. One approach to modeling time variations is to assume time varying ideal weights, and use difference integration to accommodate weight variation. However, this approach reactively suppresses the uncertainty, and has little ability to predict system behavior locally. We present an alternate formulation by leveraging Bayesian nonparametric Gaussian Process adaptive elements. We show that almost surely bounded adaptive controllers for a class of nonlinear time varying system can be formulated by incorporating time as an additional input to the Gaussian kernel. Analysis and simulations show that the learning-enabled local predictive ability of our adaptive controllers significantly improves performance.