Adaptive control

Book
Adaptive control
-astrom and witten mark
 Topics covered
• What is adaptive control? (Chap 1)
• Deterministic self tuning regulators (chap 3)
• Model reference adaptive systems (chap 5)
• Properties of adaptive systems (chap 6)
• Auto tuning (chap 8)
• Gain scheduling (chap 9)
• Robust and self oscillating systems (chap 10)
• Practical issues and implementation (chap 11)
 Introduction
• “to adapt” means to change a behavior to
conform to new circumstances.
• An adaptive controller
a controller that can modify its behavior in
response to the changes in dynamics of the
processes and the disturbances acting on the
process.
 Contd..
• An adaptive controller
a controller with adjustable parameters
and a mechanism for adjusting the
parameters.
• The parameters are adjusted to compensate
for the changes in dynamics of the plant and
the disturbances acting on the plant.
• The controller becomes nonlinear because of
the parameter adjustment mechanism
A block diagram of the adaptive
controller
 Description
• An adaptive control system can be thought of
as having two loops.
• One loop is a normal feedback with the
process and the controller.
• The other loop is the parameter adjustment
loop.
• The parameter adjustment loop is usually
slower than the normal feedback loop.
Circumstances under which adaptive control can be
preferred:

• it is convenient to control a plant with the

available conventional PID controllers.
• Some circumstances under which the adaptive
controllers can perform better than the
conventional PID controllers are:
• Change in plant transfer function due to
variations in the environment, the size and
properties of the raw materials, wear & tear of
certain components.
• Stochastic disturbances (disturbances whose
characteristics/behavior are unpredictable )
 Contd..
• Change in nature of inputs
• Propagation of disturbances along a chain of
unit processes
• Nonlinear behavior as in case of complex
chemical or biochemical reaction
• Appreciable dead time
• Unknown parameters, when control system
for new process is commissioned.
 Effects of process variations
• The standard approach to control system design
is
– to develop a linear model for the process for some
operating condition and to design a controller having
constant parameters.
A fundamental property is also that feedback systems
are intrinsically insensitive to modeling errors and
disturbances.
The mechanisms causing variation in process
dynamics and its effect on the performance of control
system is studied in the following section.
Some mechanisms causing variation in
process dynamics are:
• Nonlinear actuators
• Flow and speed variations
• Flight control
• Variation in disturbance characteristics
 Nonlinear actuators
• A very common source of variations is that actuators,
like valves have a nonlinear characteristic.
• Let
the static valve characteristics be 0
• and let and
Block diagram of a flow control loop with a PI controller and a
nonlinear valve
 Discussions
• Linearizing the system around a steady state
operating point shows that
• the incremental gain of the valve is f(u), and
hence the loop gain is proportional to f(u).
• The system can perform well at one operating
level and poorly at another
Step responses for PI control of simple
flow loop at different operating levels
 Discussions
• The controller is tuned to give a good
response at low levels of operating level.
• For higher values of operating level, the
closed loop system even becomes unstable as
can be seen in fig.3.
 Other examples
• Flow and speed variations – tank system
• Flight Control
• Variations in disturbance characteristics are
also discussed for
Ship steering control
Regulation of quality variable in process
control
 Adaptive control schemes

• Gain scheduling
• Model-Reference Adaptive System (MRAS)
• Self-Tuning Regulator (STR)
• Dual Control
 Gain Scheduling
• Gain scheduling is an adaptive control
strategy, where the gain of the system is
determined and based on its value the
controller parameters are changed.
• This approach is called gain scheduling
because
– the scheme was originally used to measure the
gain and then change, that is, schedule the
controller to compensate for changes in the
process gain.
Block diagram of system with gain
scheduling
 Description
• The system can be viewed as having two loops.
• an inner loop composed of the process and the
controller
• outer loop contains components that adjust the
controller parameters on the basis of the
operating conditions.
• regarded as mapping from process parameters to
controller parameters.
• It can be implemented as a function or a table
lookup.
 Contd..
• The concept of gain scheduling originated in
connection with the development of flight control
systems.
• In process control,
the production rate-a scheduling variable,
time constants and time delays are inversely
proportional to production rate.
• Gain scheduling is a very useful technique for
reducing the effects of parameter variations.
 Advantages and disadvantages
• Advantages:
• Parameters can be changed quickly in response to
changes in plant dynamics
• very easy to apply
• Drawbacks:
• It is an open-loop adaptation scheme, with no real
learning or intelligence
• The design required for its implementation is
enormous.
 Model – Reference Adaptive
System (MRAS)
• Used to solve a problem in which the
performance specifications are given in terms
of a reference model.
• This model tells how the process output
ideally should respond to the command signal.
Block diagram of MRAS
• composed of two loops.
• The inner loop - the process and an ordinary
feedback controller.
• The outer loop adjusts the controller parameters
in such a way that the error, which is the
difference between the process output y and
model output ym is small.
• The MRAS was originally introduced for flight
control.
• In this case, the reference model describes the
desired response of the aircraft to joystick
motions.
• The key problem with MRAS is
to determine the adjustment mechanism so that a
stable system, which brings the error to zero is
obtained.
• parameter adjustment mechanism, called MIT rule was
used in original MRAS.

e is the error between the plant and model outputs

θ is the controller parameter.
• The quantity is the sensitivity derivative of
error with respect to the parameter θ.
• The parameter γ is the adaptation rate.
• It is necessary to make approximation to
obtain the sensitivity derivative.
• The MIT rule can be regarded as a gradient
scheme to minimize the squared error e2.
 Self Tuning Regulator (STR)
• The gain scheduling and MRAS are called
direct methods, because the adjustment rule
tells directly how the controller parameters
should be updated.
• A difference scheme is obtained if the
estimates of the process parameters are
updated and the controller parameters are
obtained from the solution of a design
problem using the estimated parameters.
Block Diagram of a STR
• composed of two loops.
• The inner loop - the process and an ordinary
feedback controller.
• The parameters of the controller are adjusted
by the outer loop, which is composed of a
recursive parameter estimator and a design
calculation.
• It is sometimes not possible to estimate the process
parameters without introducing probing control
signals or perturbations.
• The system may be viewed as an automation of
process modeling and design, in which the process
model and the control design are updated at each
sampling period.
• A controller of this construction is called a Self Tuning
Regulator to emphasize that the controller
automatically tunes its parameters to obtain the
desired properties of the closed loop system.
 Adaptive control problem
An adaptive control problem is formulated by
defining the following:
• Description of the process
• Possible controller structures and
• Adaptation of controller parameters
 Description of the process
• The process is usually described by linear Single-input Single-output (SISO)
system.
• In the continuous time domain, the process is represented in state space as:

• Transfer Function form as

Where, s is the Laplace Transform variable.

• In discrete time, the process can be described in state space form as:

• The discrete time system can also be represented in transfer function form
as:
• Where, z is the z-transform variable.
 Controller Structures

• The process is controlled by a controller

that has adjustable parameters.
• Underlying design problem:
It is assumed that there exists some
kind of design procedure that makes it
possible to determine a controller that
satisfies some design criteria, if the
process and its environment are known.
• The adaptive control problem is

– used to find a method of adjusting the controller when the

characteristics of the process and its environment are
unknown or changing.
– In direct adaptive control, the controller parameters are
changed directly without the characteristics of the process
and its disturbance first being determined.
– In indirect adaptive methods, the process model and
possibly the disturbance characteristics are first
determined.
– The controller parameters are designed on the basis of this
information.
Adaptation (adjustment) of controller
parameters
• Various techniques are available like
• the MIT rule and Lyapunov technique for the
MRAS, MDPP
• LQG for STR.
• Based on the application and the
performance desired;
• any of the techniques can be chosen.
Construction of an adaptive controller contains
the following steps:
• Characterize the behavior of the closed loop
system
• Determine a suitable control law with
adjustable parameters
• Find a mechanism for adjusting the
parameters
• Implement the control law
 Applications of Adaptive control
• aerospace
• process control
• ship steering
• robotics and automotive
• biomedical systems.