NIA | Short Courses | Adaptive Control

Adaptive Control Short Course

Dates: May 9-10, 2007
Location: NIA, 100 Exploration Way, Hampton, Virginia

Instructor: Prof. Gang Tao, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, University of Virginia
Sponsor: The Dynamics Systems and Control Branch at NASA Langley Research Center.

Adaptive control is a control methodology that provides an adaptation mechanism for adjusting the controller for a system with parametric, structural and environmental uncertainties, to achieve desired system performance. Payload variation or component aging causes parametric uncertainties, and component failures lead to structural uncertainties. External disturbances and noise are typical manifestations of environmental uncertainties. Such uncertainties often appear in aircraft, spacecraft, intelligent robots, and industrial processes. Adaptive control technology has experienced many successes in both theory and applications and is developing rapidly with emergence of new challenging problems and their encouraging solutions, especially, for applications in aircraft, spacecraft, intelligent robots, and advanced process control.

This 2 day-short course will present the fundamentals of theory and design techniques of adaptive control for uncertain linear and nonlinear systems, and for systems with uncertain actuator nonlinearities and failures. Open problems and applications to control of aircraft, spacecraft, and intelligent robots will be discussed.

This short course consists of the following topics:

Day 1:
1. Introduction to system models and stability
2. Adaptive parameter estimation
3. Model reference adaptive control with state feedback
4. Model reference adaptive control with output feedback
5. Adaptive backstepping control
This part will present parametrized control system models, signal norms, Lyapunov stability, passivity, error models, gradient- and least squares- algorithms for parameter estimation, adaptive observers, direct adaptive control, indirect adaptive control, certainty equivalence principle, multivariable adaptive control, nonlinear backstepping control techniques, and stability theory of adaptive control.
Day 2:
1. Adaptive control of systems with actuator nonlinearities
2. Adaptive control of systems with actuator failures
3. Aircraft and spacecraft applications
4. Open problems in adaptive control
This part will present modeling of systems with nonsmooth actuator nonlinearities (particularly, dead-zone, backlash, hysteresis, and piecewise-linear characteristics) and failures, development of adaptive nonlinearity inverses and failure compensation schemes, unifications of adaptive control with adaptive inverses to cancel the effects of the actuator nonlinearities for a known, unknown or partially known linear part, design of robust adaptive laws for updating the adaptive inverse parameters as well as the adaptive controller parameters, demonstration of performance improvements achieved by adaptive controllers with adaptive inverses and compensation schemes. It will present some advanced applications such as adaptive control of synthetic jet actuators for aircraft flight control, adaptive compensation of aircraft rudder failures, adaptive control of underactuated spacecraft, and some open problems in adaptive failure compensation for aircraft, spacecraft, intelligent robot systems.

Instructor Biography: Gang Tao received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1989 from University of Southern California. He was an assistant professor at Washington State University from 1989 to 1991, and an assistant research engineer at University of California at Santa Barbara from 1991 to 1992. He joined Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Virginia in 1992, where he is now a professor.

He has been working in areas of adaptive control for more than 20 years. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and his publications include 4 books, 1 co-edited book, over 60 journal papers, 6 book chapters, and over 140 conference papers on adaptive control, nonlinear control, multivariable control, optimal control, control applications and robotics. He is an associate editor for Automatica and a subject editor for International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing. He was an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He has been a program committee member for numerous international conferences and was the organizer and chair of 2001 International Symposium on Adaptive and Intelligent Systems and Control, held in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He taught numerous courses in systems, controls, robotics and mathematics. His recent research includes adaptive control of systems with actuator and sensor nonlinearities, adaptive control of systems with actuator failures, adaptive control of multivariable systems, control of sandwich nonlinear systems with nonsmooth nonlinearities, control of real-time systems, control of magnetic bearing systems for artificial heart pumps, control of physiological systems, and robotics. His research has been supported by ARMY, DARPA, NASA, NIH, and NSF, and by Edison Power, MedQuest, and SCEEE.

Registration: To register, send e-mail to Lisa Burke at lburke@nianet.org. Course size is limited to 20 participants.

For additional information contact Lisa Burke at (757) 325-6731.