Adaptive Feedback Control

Adaptive control is now finding its way into the marketplace after many years of effort. This paper reviews some ideas used to design adaptive control systems. It covers early ideas which primarily attempt to compensate for gain variations and more general methods like gain scheduling, model reference adaptive control, and self-tuning regulators. It is shown that adaptive control laws can be obtained using stochastic control theory. Techniques for analyzing adaptive systems are discussed. This covers stability and convergence analysis. Issues of importance for applications like parameterization, tuning, and tracking, as well as different ways of using adaptive control are also discussed. An overview of applications which includes feasibility studies as well as products based on adaptive techniques concludes the paper.