Classical pole placement adaptive control revisited: linear-like convolution bounds and exponential stability

Abstract

While the original classical parameter adaptive controllers do not handle noise or unmodelled dynamics well, redesigned versions have been proven to have some tolerance; however, exponential stabilization and a bounded gain on the noise are rarely proven. Here we consider a classical pole placement adaptive controller using the original projection algorithm rather than the commonly modified version; we impose the assumption that the plant parameters lie in a convex, compact set, although some progress has been made at weakening the convexity requirement. We demonstrate that the closed-loop system exhibits a very desirable property: there are linear-like convolution bounds on the closed-loop behaviour, which confers exponential stability and a bounded noise gain, and which can be leveraged to prove tolerance to unmodelled dynamics and plant parameter variation. We emphasize that there is no persistent excitation requirement of any sort; the improved performance arises from the vigilant nature of the parameter estimator.