Advances in Control Systems

INTRODUCTION:
Conventional control theory relies on the key assumption of small
range 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 nonlinearities in the system
cannot be properly compensated for. For a long time the
automatic control of physical processes, in spite of the use of the
principle of feedback, has been an experimental technique deriving
more from art than from scientific basis. The requirement for more
complex and higher-performance control systems have 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 else missing when a practical control system
must be designed; a good knowledge of the dynamic
characteristics of the controlled plant.
Another assumption of linear control is that the system is indeed
linearizable. However in control systems there are many
nonlinearities whose discontinuous nature does not allow linear
approximation. These nonlinearities include Coloumb friction, valve
hysteresis, reactor deadzones, backlash etc. are often found in
control engineering. These effects cannot be derived from linear
model and need a nonlinear technique. In designing linear
controllers, it is usually necessary to assume that the parameters of
the system model are reasonably well known. However, many
control problems involve uncertainties in the model parameters.
This may be a slow variation of the parameters e.g., fouling of heat
exchangers to an abrupt change in parameters e.g., inertial
parameters of a robot when a new object is grasped. A linear
controller based on inaccurate or obsolete values of the model
parameters may exhibit significant performance degradation or
even instability. Nonlinearities can be intentionally introduced into
the controller part of a control system so that model uncertainties
can be tolerated..

To implement high-performance control systems when the plant

dynamic characteristics are poorly known or when large and
unpredictable variations occur, a new class of control systems
called nonlinear control systems have evolved which provide
potential solutions. Four classes of nonlinear controllers for this
purpose are robust controllers, adaptive controllers, fuzzy logic
controllers and neural controllers.

ADAPTIVE CONTROL:
An adaptive controller is a controller that can modify its behaviour
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 stages 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 regulator parameters. One of the goals of
adaptive control is to compensate for parameter variations, which
may occur due to nonlinear actuators, changes in the operating
conditions of the process, and non-stationary disturbances acting
on the process.
the basic objective of adaptive controller is to maintain a
consistent performance of a system in the presence of uncertainty
or unknown variation in the plant parameters.

An adaptive controller is a controller with adjustable parameters

and a mechanism for adjusting the parameters. An adaptive
control system can be thought of as having two loops. One loop is
a normal feedback with the process (plant) and controller. The
other loop is a parameter adjustment loop. A block diagram of an
adaptive system is shown in Fig. 16.1. The parameter adjustment
loop is often slower than the normal feedback loop.
There are two main approaches for designing adaptive controllers.
One is known as Model Reference Adaptive Control method, while
the other is called as Self-Tuning method.

Model-Reference Adaptive Control:

(MRAC):The Model-Reference Adaptive Control system is an
adaptive servo system in which the desired performance is
expressed in terms of a reference model, which gives desired
response to the reference signal. Such a system can be
schematically represented by Fig. 16.2
MRAC is composed of four parts: a plant containing unknown
parameters, a reference model for compactly specifying the
desired output of the control system, a feedback control law
containing adjustable parameters. The ordinary feedback loop is
known as the inner loop and the parameter adjustment loop is
called as the outer loop.

Plant:
The plant is assumed to have a known structure, although the
parameters are unknown
For eg: in a servo motor the structure of dynamics is known but
parameters such as mass, link length are not known. In such cases
adaptive control provides the solution

Reference Model:
A reference model is used to specify the ideal response of the
adaptive control system to the external command. The choice of
the reference model has to satisfy two requirements.
1. It should reflect the performance specification in the control
tasks, such as rise time, settling time, overshoot or equivalent
frequency domain characteristics.
2. The ideal behaviour specified by the reference model should be
achievable for the adaptive control system.

Controller:
The controller is usually parameterized by a number of adjustable
parameters. This implies that there exists different sets of
controller parameter values for which the desired control task is
achievable. Usually the control law is linear in terms of the
adjustable parameters (linear parameterization). Existing adaptive
control designs normally require linear para- meterization the
controller in order to obtain adaptation mechanisms with
guaranteed stability and tracking convergence.

Adaptation Mechanism:
The adaptation mechanism is used to adjust the parameters in the
control law. In MRAC systems the adaptation law searches for the
parameters such that the response of the plant under adaptive
control becomes the same as that of the reference model. Thus
adaptation mechanism drives the tracking error to zero. This
adaptation mechanism is designed to guarantee the stability of the
control system as well as convergence of the tracking error to zero

The design of MRAC usually involves the following three steps:

1. Choose a control law containing variable parameters.

2. Choose an adaptation law for adjusting those parameters.
3. Analyze the convergence properties of the resulting closed loop
control system

Self-Tuning Control:
Historically self-tuning control has been implemented mostly in
discrete time while MRAC has been implemented in continous
time. A general architecture for the self-tuning control is given in
Fig. 16.11.

Self-tuning control has two essential components:

1. Parameter estimation, and
2. Control law.

Parameter Estimation:
Parameter estimation is a key element in a self-tuner and is
performed on-line. The model parameters are estimated based on
the measurable process input, process output, and state signals. A
number of recursive parameter estimation schemes are employed
for self-tuning control. The most popular scheme is the recursive
least squares estimation method.
Control Law:
The control law is derived based on control performance criterion
optimization. Since the parameters are estimated on-line, the
calculation of control law is based on a procedure called certainty
equivalent in which the current parameter estimates are accepted
while ignoring their uncertainties. This approach of designing
controllers using estimated parameters of the transfer function of
the process is known as indirect self tuning method