Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Maritime and Naval Science and Engineering

Adaptive Controller Design for DC Drive System

Using Gradient Technique
A. ASSENI*, A. ALBAGUL*, O. JOMAH**
*
Control Engineering Department, The Higher Institute of Electronics, Baniwalid, Libya
**
Faculty of Electrical, Engineering, Automatics, Computer Science and Electronics
AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
rubasi@hieb.edu.ly, albagul@ieee.org, immer_jom@yahoo.com

Abstract: - Adaptive control systems have been studied for many years. There are many types of adaptive
control algorithms, one of which is the reference model technique. In this paper, the work has been devoted for
the use of model reference adaptive control system (MRAC). The MRAC algorithm with parameters adaptation
was developed and applied for control of the DC motor drive. The algorithm is based on the gradient technique
with parameter adaptation. The controller can significantly improve system behavior and force the system to
follow the reference model and minimize the error between the model and plant output.

Key-Words: - Adaptive Control, MRAC, MIT rule, DC Drive.

1 Introduction
The model reference adaptive control system is one
of the most feasible and effective approaches for an
adaptive control system. The problem of model
reference adaptive control has been treated by some
authors [1, 2, 3, 4]. The objective in model reference
adaptive control is to design a differentiator-free
controller so that the output y (t ) of the plant
G P (s ) asymptotically tracks the output of a stable
reference model G (s ) for all piecewise continuous
m Fig.1 Block diagram of MRAC system
reference input signals r (t ) . In order to meet the
control objective, the following assumptions which
are standard in the model reference control literature
have been considered:
-The plant G P (s ) is minimum phase.
- The relative degree of the reference model
transfer function G (s ) is greater than or equal to
m
that of the plant transfer function G P (s ) .
2 Gradient Approach for MRAS
Gradient method is the basic approach in reference
model adaptive theory. Model Reference Adaptive
Control (MRAC) was originally proposed to solve a
problem where the specifications are given in terms
of a reference model that describes the desired
behavior of the closed loop system. Figure 1 shows
the block diagram of the basic idea of the Model
Reference Adaptive Control.
ym
e
y
In this case the reference model is in parallel with
the system. The regulator can be thought of as
consisting of two loops. The inner loop, which is the
ordinary feedback loop, composed of the process
and controller and the outer loop is thus that
adaptation loop. The parameters of the controller are
adjusted by the outer loop in such a way that the
difference between the process output y and the
model output y m becomes small. An important
issue is to determine the adjustment mechanism so
that a stable system that brings the error to zero is
obtained. The following parameter adjustment
mechanism, called the MIT rule, was originally used
in MRAC
dθ ∂e
= −γ e (1)
dt ∂θ
The error between the system output and the
reference model output is expressed as:
e = y − ym

ISSN: 1790-2769 125 ISBN: 978-960-474-120-5

 Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Maritime and Naval Science and Engineering

The components of ∂e are the sensitivity b0 (k1 s + k 2 )

y(s) = u c (s) (4)
∂θ s + ( a 1 + b 0θ 1 ) s + ( a 2 + b 0θ 2 )
2

derivatives of the error with respect to the adjustable We would like the closed-loop system to follow the
parameter vector θ . The parameter γ is known as behavior of reference model given by:
the adaptation gain. The MIT rule is a gradient α s +ϖ n2
scheme that aims to minimize the squared error e 2 . y m (s) = 2 u (s) (5)
s + 2ςϖ n s + ϖ n
2 c

This will ensure unity steady-state gain, natural

3 Controller Design for DC Drive
DC motors have long been widely used in many
industrial applications. A DC motor can be
considered a Single Input Single Output (SISO)
System having torque speed characteristics
compatible with most mechanical loads. In this
section, the parameter adaptation laws for the
control algorithm using the MIT rule was
developed. Consider the transfer function of the DC
motor represented by (Mohan, Undeland, and
Robbins, 1995) as follows:
kT
G P (s) =
ϖ m(s)
=
La J
V (s) L B + Ra J
s 2
+ ( a )s + a
frequency ϖ n , damping ratio ς and α to be
positive constants. It is possible to derive adaptation
rules for the controller parameters k1 , k 2 ,θ 1 and θ 2
of control law (3) based on MIT rule such that
b0 ( k 1 s + k 2 ) α s +ϖ n 2
⇒ (6)
s + ( a1 + b0θ 1 ) s + ( a 2 + b0θ 2 )
2
s 2 + 2ςϖ n s + ϖ n
2
This approximation is valid when the parameters
close to their correct values. Recall that the model
error is defined as e = y − y m , to apply the MIT
rule, we define the cost function as:
1 2
J= e (7)
R B + kT K 2
E

La J La J Then, the approximate parameter adaptation laws

b0 y ( s) are as follows:
= = (2) dk 1 b0 s
s + a1 s + a 2 u c ( s )
2
dt
= −γ 1e 2
s + ( a 1 + b 0θ 1 ) s + ( a 2 + b 0θ 2 )
uc

where, dk 2 b0
= −γ 2 e 2 uc
K T = torque constant dt s + ( a 1 + b 0θ 1 ) s + ( a 2 + b 0θ 2 )
J = equivalent moment of inertia of the motor dθ 1 b0 s (8)
= γ 3e 2 y
K E = electromotive constant dt s + ( a 1 + b 0θ 1 ) s + ( a 2 + b 0θ 2 )
dθ 2 b0
Ra = armature winding resistance = γ 4e 2 y
dt s + ( a 1 + b 0θ 1 ) s + ( a 2 + b 0θ 2 )
La = armature winding inductance d
Where s ≡
B= viscous friction coefficient dt
ω m (s) is the measured output The approximation has been made for the unknown
v(s) is the input signal parameters to tune the controller parameters such
y(s) is the output of the system that:
dk 1 s
r (s) is the command signal = −α 1e 2 uc
s + 2 ςϖ n s + ϖ
2
dt
Let, n

dk 2 1
b0 =
kT , a = ( L a B + R a J ) , a = Ra B + kT k E , = −α 2 e 2 uc
s + 2 ςϖ n s + ϖ
2
La J
1
La J
2
La J dt n

dθ 1 s (9)
Assume that, the parameters a1 , a 2 and b0 may or = α 3e 2 y
s + 2 ςϖ n s + ϖ
2
dt n
may not known to the user. The control law is dθ 2 1
considered to be in the following form: = α 4e 2 y
s + 2 ςϖ n s + ϖ
2
dt
u ( s ) = (k1 s + k 2 )u c ( s ) − (θ 1 s + θ 2 ) y ( s )
n
(3)
s 2 + (a1 + b0θ1 )s + (a2 + b0θ 2 ) ≅ s 2 + 2ςϖ n s + ϖ n
2

The controller parameters k 1 , k 2 , θ 1 and θ 2 are

where,
determined using gradient approach. It is possible to
show that applying control law (3) to system (2)
α i = b0γ i , i = 1,2,3,4 represent the rates for
gives the following closed-loop transfer function: updating the controller parameters.

ISSN: 1790-2769 126 ISBN: 978-960-474-120-5

 Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Maritime and Naval Science and Engineering

4 Simulation Results
In this section the results of simulation studies are
presented to give an indication of the performance
of the proposed algorithm. We consider the plant
parameters are as follows:
k T = k E = 0.3, B = 0.01,
R a = 2Ω, L a = 0.1H , J = 0.1
The reference model transfer function is given by:
10 s + 50
G m ( s) =
s + 10 s + 50
2
Fig.4 Time history of controller parameters
We have chosen α1 = α 2 = 100, α3 =1000, and
α 4 = 10
The input signal is a square wave with amplitude of
1 and frequency of 1 rad/sec as shown in Fig.2.
Fig.3 shows that, the plant output y(t) can converge
to the reference model output y m (t ) and the system
gives good model following. At the same time, the
controller parameters also converge to their correct
values as shown in Fig.4. Fig.5 shows that, the
tracking error e(t ) between plant and model outputs
is minimized and goes to zero when the controller
parameters close to true vales. Fig.5 Time history of the error signal

5 Conclusions
The proposed MRAC using the gradient technique
has been developed and implemented. The proposed
technique has been applied to a simulated DC drive
system. The results obtained from the simulation
show that the effectiveness of the technique on the
performance of the process. It can be seen that the
plant output y(t) converges to the reference model
output y m (t ) and the system have good model
following when the controller parameters converge
Fig.2 Input Signal to their steady-state values.

References:
[1] K. J. Astrom, B. Wittenmark, Adaptive control,
Addison-Wesley, 1989.
[2] S. Sastry and M.Bodson, Adaptive Control: Stability,
Convergence, and Robustness, Prentice Hall, 1989.
[3] R. Isermann, K.-H. Lachmann, D. Matko, Adaptive
control Systems, Prentice Hall, 1992.
[4] H. Kaufman, I. Barkana, and K. Sobel, Direct
Adaptive control Algorithms: Theory and
Applications, Springer-Verlag, 1998.
[5] K.Pirabakaran and V. M. Becerra , Automatic tuning
of PID controller using model reference adaptive
control technique, IEEE Industrial Electronics
Fig.3 Plant and Model outputs Society, 2001, pp 736-740.

ISSN: 1790-2769 127 ISBN: 978-960-474-120-5

 Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Maritime and Naval Science and Engineering

[6] A. A. El-Samahy, Speed control of DC motor using

adaptive variable structure control, IEEE transactions
on automatic control, 2000, pp 1118-1123.
[7] M. S. Ehsani, Adaptive control of servo motor by
MRAC method, IEEE transactions on automatic
control, 2007, pp 78-83.

ISSN: 1790-2769 128 ISBN: 978-960-474-120-5