Robust model reference adaptive control for transient performance enhancement

Abstract

SUMMARYTo circumvent the potentially poor transient response induced by nonlinear uncertain dynamics in the adaptive control system, this article proposes a new model reference adaptive control design scheme to improve its transient control response. We first construct a compensator to online extract the undesired dynamics in the online learning, which is incorporated into the reference model and control simultaneously. Then, an error feedback term is incorporated into the reference model to speed up the convergence of both the compensator and tracking error. Moreover, a new leakage term containing the estimation error is constructed and then added in the adaptive law to guarantee the convergence of both the estimation error and tracking error. To further reveal the mechanisms behind these proposed methods, a new methodology to analyze the transient error bounds based on L2‐norm and Cauchy‐Schwartz inequality is also developed. Based on the analysis results, we find that the proposed methods can effectively reduce the bound of the tracking error and thus achieve an improved transient control performance without violating the system stability even with high‐gain adaptation. In addition, the frequency‐domain analysis is resorted to show the comparative responses of different adaptive laws, which indicate that the proposed adaptive law can maintain the stability margin even with a high‐gain learning rate. A numerical example is given to demonstrate improved control responses of these proposed schemes.