A PAPER ON

ADAPTIVE CONTROL SYSTEMS

AT
NSET-07
MALINENI LAKSHMAIH ENGINEERING
COLLEGE

SINGARAYAKONDA

R.KIRANMAYI

III/IV B.TECH

E.E.E
ROLL NO:-04L11A0208

E-mail:-kimmi_ramaraju@yahoo.co.in

V.R.S & Y.R.N COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY

CHIRALA
PRAKASAM DISTRICT
• ABSTTRACT
• INTRODUCTION
• MAIN APPROACHES TO ADAPTIVE
CONTROL
• DC-MOTOR SPEED CONTROL:MRAC
DESIGN
• CONCLUSION
 ADAPTIVE CONTROL

ABSTRACT
Conventional control theory relies on the key assumption of small range of
operation for the linear model to be valid. When the operation range is large, a linear
controller is likely to perform poorly or to be unstable; because the parameter uncertainty,
input disturbance and measurement noise cannot be compensated for the requirement of
more complex and higher performance control systems has been the impulse for the
development of a systematic control theory. Even with the development of such a
systematic control theory, there is still usually something missing when a practical
control system is designed; a good knowledge of the dynamic characteristics of the
controlled plant is required.

To implement high-performance control systems when the plant

dynamics characteristics are poorly known or when large and unpredictable variations
(parameter uncertainty, load disturbance, measurement noise etc.) occur, a new class of
control systems called nonlinear control systems have evolved which provides potential
solutions. There are classes of nonlinear controllers for these purposes are robust
controller, adaptive controller, fuzzy logic controller and neural controller.

Biological systems are known to cope easily and efficiently with

changes in environments. As interest in control theory shifted over the years to control
the systems with greater uncertainty, efforts were made to incorporate in them
characteristics similar to those in living organism. The characteristics of the process can
change with time due to variety of factors. There may be unforeseen changes in the
external inputs and disturbances may be considered as changes in environment in which
the system operates. Adaptive control is thus an important area of modern control,
which refers to the control of systems in the presence of uncertainties, nonlinearities,
structural perturbations and environmental variations.
INTRODUCTION
What is Adaptive Control?
“Adaptive controller is a controller with adjustable parameters and a mechanism for
adjusting the parameters”.
Block diagram of an Adaptive system.

Parameter
Adjustment
An Controller
Parameter
Set Point

Controller Plant
Control Output
Signal

adaptive controller is a controller that can modify its behavior in response to changes in
the dynamics of the process and the disturbances. Adaptive control can be considered as a
special type of nonlinear feedback control in which the states of the process can be
separated into two categories, which can change at different rates. The slowly changing
states are viewed as parameters with a fast time scale for the ordinary feedback and a
slower one for updating controller parameters. One of the goals of adaptive control is to
compensate for parameter variations, which may occur due to nonlinear actuators,
changes in operating conditions of the process and disturbance.
An adaptive control system can be thought of as having two
loops. One loop is a normal feedback loop with the process (plant) and controller. The
other loop is a parameter adjustment loop. The parameter adjustment loop is often slower
than the normal feedback loop. The basic function common to most adaptive control
systems are the following:
 Identification of unknown parameters or measurement of an index of
performance.
 Decision on control strategy.
 On-line modification of the parameters of the controller.
Main Approaches to Adaptive Control
There are three main adaptive control schemes.
 Gain Scheduling
 Self-Tuning Regulator (STR)
 Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC)

Gain Scheduling:
Block diagram of gain scheduling

Gain
Controller
Schedule
Parameter
Operating
Set Point Conditions

Controller Plant
Control
Signal Output
 One of the earliest and most intuitive approaches
to adaptive control is gain scheduling. The idea is to find auxiliary process variables
(other than plant outputs used for feedback) that correlate well with the changes in the
process dynamics. Controller is constructed with different gains, which meets the
performance requirements covering the set of possible operating conditions. The
advantage of gain scheduling is that the parameters can be changed quickly in response to
changes in plant dynamics. One of the limitations of gain scheduling is that the
adjustment mechanisms of the controller gains are precomputed off-line and, therefore,
provide no feedback to compensate for incorrect schedules. Unpredictable changes in the
plant dynamics may lead to deterioration of performance or even the failure. Another
limitation is high design and implementation cost that increases with the large number of
operating points.

Self-Tuning Regulator (STR)

Block
Process Parameter

Controller Estimation
Design
Controller
Parameter
Reference
s

Controller Process
Control
Input

diagram of Self-Tuning Regulator (STR).

In this technique of adaptive control, one starts from a control

design method for known plants. This design method is summarized by a controller
structure, and a relationship between plant parameters and controller parameters. Since
the plant parameters are unknown, they are obtained using a recursive parameter
identification algorithm. The controller parameters are then obtained from the estimates
of the plant parameters, in the same way as if these were the true parameters. This is
referred as Certainty Equivalence Principle. This is an indirect control because the
controller parameters are obtained from the solution of a design problem using the
estimated parameters of the process.
 The controller is called self-tuning because it has the ability to
tune its own parameters. The self-tuning regulator (STR) is very flexible with respect to
the choice of controller design methodology and the choice of identification scheme. The
analysis of self-tuning adaptive systems is however more complex than the analysis of
model reference schemes, primarily due to the transformation from identifier parameters
to controller parameters. STR has been helpful in the study of stochastic regulation
problems.

Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC)

“In MRAC desired performance is specified through a reference
model and the adaptive system attempts to make the plant output match the reference
model output asymptotically.”

Reference
Model

Adjustment
Mechanism
Controller
Parameter

Controller Plant
Command
Input
Control
Input

Block diagram of MRAC.

 Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) is derived from the
model following problem or Model Reference Control (MRC). In MRC the performance
requirements, the plant should meet are specified in terms of reference model, which
describes the desired I/O behavior of the closed-loop plant. The objective of MRC is to
find the feedback control law that changes the structure and dynamics of the plant so that
its I/O behavior are exactly the same as those of the reference model i.e., the tracking
error e=yp-ym, which represents the deviation of the plant output from the desired
trajectory, converges to zero with time. When the parameters of the plant are unknown,
MRC cannot be implemented. One way of dealing with the unknown parameter case is
to use the certainty equivalence approach to replace the unknown controller parameters in
the control law with its estimates. The resulting control scheme is known as MRAC.

In MRAC, a good understanding of the plant and the

performance requirements, it has to meet allow the designer to come up with a model,
referred to as the reference model, that describes the desired I/O behavior of the closed-
loop plant. The objective of MRAC is to find the feedback control law that changes the
structure and dynamics of the plant so that its I/O properties are exactly the same as those
of the reference model. The reference model is designed so that for a given reference
input signal the output of the reference model represents the desired response the plant
output should follow. The feedback controller is designed so that all signals are bounded
and the closed-loop plant transfer function is equal to reference model. This transfer
function matching guarantees that for any given reference input, the tracking error which
represents the deviation of the plant output from the desired trajectory converges to zero
with time. The transfer function matching is achieved by canceling the zeros of the plant
transfer function and replacing them with those of reference model through the use of the
feedback controller. The cancellation of the plant zeros puts a restriction on the plant to
be minimum phase, i.e., have stable zeros. If any plant zero is unstable, its cancellation
may easily lead to unbounded signals. Therefore, for the MRAC objective to be achieved
the plant model has to be minimum phase.
 Model reference adaptive control can be designed using either
state feedback or output feedback; output feedback model reference control is more
challenging and has more potential applications. When the plant parameters are
unknown, adaptive laws are needed to update the parameters of a model reference
controller.

DC MOTOR SPEED CONTROL: MRAC DESIGN

Introduction
Electric drives are replacing hydraulic systems as the
primary means of actuation and guided manipulation. Their applications are wide spread,
ranging from robots to automobiles to aircraft. This trend is mainly due to the recent
advances in the design of electric drives, which have brought to the market, low cost,
lightweight, and reliable motors, which can be easily controlled. Notable advances are in
the design of dc motors, induction motors, and stepper motors etc. Further more, there
has been significant progress in the area of digital control systems resulting in the
development of intelligent, adaptive, robust control strategies. There have been numerous
reported applications where adaptive control, variable structure control, fuzzy control,
and neural network control based techniques have been developed and in some cases
implemented to show their versatility in the control of electric drives.
The requirement of high performance control system for
industrial applications has produced great research efforts for the application of modern
control theory and in particular, adaptive control .The model reference adaptive control
(MRAC) techniques are applied to electric drive systems. In MRAC, the output response
is forced to track the response of a reference model irrespective of plant varying
operating conditions. The controller parameters are adjusted adaptively to give a desired
closed-loop performance. The adaptive controller maintains constant dynamic
performance in the presence of unpredictable and immeasurable variations of operating
conditions.
A high performance drive system consists of a motor, a
converter and a controller. This requires the shaft speed of the motor to closely follow a
trajectory of the controlled variable (speed). The noise rejection capability of adaptive
control schemes are effectively used in order to achieve a specified trajectory regardless
of unknown load variations and other parameter uncertainties. Designing a controller to
track this unknown dynamical behavior is difficult. One way to compensate for these
uncertainties is to identify the motor load dynamics through the parameters of a pre-
defined model. These model parameters can then be manipulated using different control
strategies to come up with the controller design. If the unknown dynamics are time
varying, the identification has to be performed on-line. In thesis work adaptive control
approach (MRAC) is implemented to control the speed of a dc motor, improving the
controller closed loop system performance and resulting in better load torque disturbance
suppression. Here the speed control of the dc motor under various levels of load torque
disturbance, measurement noise and under parameter uncertainty is studied.
Model Description
DC motors have been used in advanced control
algorithms because of their stable and linear characteristics. This makes a dc motor
controllable over a wide range of speeds by proper adjustments of its terminal voltage.
The DC motor takes a single input voltage and generates a single output parameter in the
form of output speed. It is therefore considered as single input single output (SISO)
system; thereby eliminating the complications associated with a multi input drive
systems. The motor used is the armature controlled DC motor. The dynamics of an
armature controlled dc motor required for modeling is given as below.
 Schematic diagram of armature controlled dc motor.
The main assumptions for describing the motor dynamics are:
1. The magnetic circuit is linear (because due to saturation of the magnetic core linear
relationship does not hold for high values of field current)
2. The mechanical friction including viscous friction and Coulomb friction is linear in the
rated speed region.
All the notations used have their usual meanings. The related dynamics equations are
di a
Va = R a ia + La + Eb (3.1)
dt
E b = K b .ωm (3.2)
di a
Va = R a ia + La + Kb ωm (3.3)
dt
dωm
Tm = J m . + Bm .ωm (3.5)
dt
Taking the Laplace transform of equation (3.1)-(3.5), assuming zero initial conditions, we
get
Tm (s) = K T Ia (s) (3.6)
E b = K b ωm (s) (3.7)
E a (s) − E b (s) = (La .s + R a )Ia (s) (3.8)
(J m .s + Bm ) = TM (s) − TL (s) (3.9)
 Block diagram of a dc motor (armature controlled) system.
Equation (3.6)-(3.9) gives the transfer function between the motor velocity ωm (s) and the

input voltage E a (s) is given as below.

ωm (s) KT
= (3.10)
E a (s) (La s + R a )(Jm s + Bm ) + KT Kb

6
00

5
00 re
fere
nce
actua
l
speed (rpm)

4
00

3
00

2
00

1
00

0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
tim
e(s
eco
nds
)

Response at full load (12.95 Nm) applied at t=3 sec.

 E
n
la
r
ge
dv
ie
w
5
5
5

r
ef
er
en
ce
a
ct
ual

speed(rpm) 5
5
0

5
4
5

5
4
0
3 3
.
5 4 4
.
5 5 5
.
5 6
t
ime
(
se
co
n
ds
)

Enlarged view showing speed tracking of motor.

Conclusions

In DC motor case study, implementation of MRAC

scheme meets the solution to both class of control problems i.e. regulation problem and
set point problem, in spite of changes in load disturbance and parameter uncertainties. In
these cases initially motor is started at no load and then different magnitude of load
disturbance is applied. because the initial values of the controller parameters are taken as
zero or otherwise, which may not be accurate enough. To demonstrate the effectiveness
of the MRAC, dc motor has been simulated under various operating conditions such as
load disturbance, parameter variations, and measurement noise and for different shapes of
tracks specified.

The adaptive scheme used for the dc motor also

demonstrates the load disturbance rejection capability. This is important when motor is to
be operated at constant speed under varying load perturbations. The oscillatory nature of
the control input is due to external load disturbances. A smoother control input imparts
lower electrical stresses on the motor which in turn results in their longer life. The range
of the bound on the load disturbance depends on the system input limits and its dynamics
to achieve smooth operation. All the results show the values of control input, input
current and speed as per the motor ratings. A dc motor has been successfully controlled
using MRAC scheme.

REFERENCES:

Adaptive Control Systems : By Astrom

Adaptive Tracking Control High Performance DC Drives :By Siri Weerasooriya &
E.I.Sharkawi
E.I.Samahy: Speed Control Of DC Motor using Adaptive Variable Structure Control ,
IEEE proceedings 0-7803-5692-6100/2000.