Session 36

Session Objectives:
To describe principle of operation and applications of adaptive control, robust control and
artificial neural network, Fuzzy logic.

Instructions:
Brief introduction to advances in control system

Adaptive control

Introduction:
Adaptive control is the control method used by a controller which must adapt to a controlled
system with parameters which vary, or are initially uncertain. For example, as an aircraft flies, its
mass will slowly decrease as a result of fuel consumption; a control law is needed that adapts
itself to such changing conditions. Adaptive control is different from robust control in that it does
not need a priori information about the bounds on these uncertain or time-varying parameters;
robust control guarantees that if the changes are within given bounds the control law need not be
changed, while adaptive control is concerned with control law changing itself.

Basic Objective:
• Maintain consistent performance of a system in the presence of uncertainty and variations
in plant parameters
• Adaptive control is superior to robust control in dealing with uncertainties in constant or
slow-varying parameters
• Robust control has advantages in dealing with disturbances, quickly varying parameters,
and unmodeled dynamics

Classification of Adaptive Control Techniques:

In general one should distinguish between
• Feed forward adaptive control
• Feedback adaptive control
• Direct methods –Direct methods are ones wherein the estimated parameters are those
directly used in the adaptive controller.
• Indirect methods- Indirect methods are those in which the estimated parameters are used
to calculate required controller parameters
• Hybrid methods - Hybrid methods rely on both estimation of parameters and direct
modification of the control law.
 Model-Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC)

Model reference adaptive control (MRAC) is one of the main approaches to adaptive
control. The basic structure of a MRAC scheme is shown in Figure. The reference model
is chosen to generate the desired trajectory, ym, that the plant output yp has to follow.
The tracking error e1 4 = yp−ym represents the deviation of the plant output from the
desired trajectory. The closed-loop plant is made up of an ordinary feedback control law
that contains the plant and a controller C (θ) and an adjustment mechanism that generates
the controller parameter estimates θ (t) on-line. The purpose of this chapter is to design
the controller and parameter adjustment mechanism so that all signals in the closed-loop
plant are bounded and the plant output yp tracks ym as close as possible. MRAC schemes
can be characterized as direct or indirect and with normalized or unnormalized adaptive
laws. In direct MRAC, the parameter vector θ of the controller C (θ) is updated directly
by an adaptive law, whereas in indirect MRAC θ is calculated at each time t by solving a
certain algebraic equation that relates θ with the on-line estimates of the plant parameters.
In both direct and indirect MRAC with normalized adaptive laws, the form of C (θ),
motivated from the known parameter case, is kept unchanged. The controller C (θ) is
combined with an adaptive law (or an adaptive law and

an algebraic equation in the indirect case) that is developed independently . This design
procedure allows the use of a wide class of adaptive laws that includes gradient, least-squares
and those based on the SPR-Lyapunov design approach. On the other hand, in the case of MRAC
schemes with unnormalized adaptive laws, C (θ) is modified to lead to an error equation whose
form allows the use of the SPRLyapunov design approach for generating the adaptive law. In this
case, the design of C(θ) and adaptive law is more complicated in both the direct and indirect
case, but the analysis is much simpler and follows from a consideration of a single Lyapunov-
like function. These examples are used to motivate the more general and complicated designs
treated in the rest of the chapter. In Section 6.3 we define the model reference control (MRC)
problem for SISO plants and solve it for the case of known plant parameters. The control law
developed in this section is used in the rest of the chapter to form MRAC schemes in the
unknown parameter case. The design of direct MRAC schemes with unnormalized adaptive laws
is treated in Section 6.4 for plants with relative degree n∗ = 1,2,3. The case of n∗> 3 follows by
using the same techniques as in the case of n∗ = 3 and is omitted because of the complexity of
the control law that increases with n∗.

Application of Adaptive Control:

Typical applications of adaptive control are:
• Self-tuning of subsequently fixed linear controllers during the implementation phase for
one operating point;
• Self-tuning of subsequently fixed robust controllers during the implementation phase for
whole range of operating points;
• Self-tuning of fixed controllers on request if the process behaviour changes due to ageing,
drift, wear etc.;
• Adaptive control of linear controllers for nonlinear or time-varying processes;
• Adaptive control or self-tuning control of nonlinear controllers for nonlinear processes;
• Adaptive control or self-tuning control of multivariable controllers for multivariable
processes (MIMO systems);
• A particularly successful application of adaptive control has been adaptive flight control.
This body of work has focused on guaranteeing stability of a model reference adaptive
control scheme using Lyapunov arguments. Several successful flight-test demonstrations
have been conducted, including fault tolerant adaptive control.
 Robust control

In control theory, robust control is an approach to controller design that explicitly deals
with uncertainty. Robust control methods are designed to function properly provided that
uncertain parameters or disturbances are found within some (typically compact) set. Robust
methods aim to achieve robust performance and/or stability in the presence of bounded modeling
errors. In contrast with an adaptive control policy, a robust control policy is static; rather than
adapting to measurements of variations, the controller is designed to work assuming that certain
variables will be unknown but bounded.Robust control refers to the control of unknown plants
with unknown dynamics subject to unknown disturbances". Clearly, the key issue with robust
control systems is uncertainty and how the control system can deal with this problem. Figure
shows an expanded view of the simple control loop presented earlier. Uncertainty is shown
entering the system in three places. There is uncertainty in the model of the plant. There are
disturbances that occur in the plant system. Also there is noise which is read on the sensor inputs.
Each of these uncertainties can have an additive or multiplicative component
 Fuzzy logic

• The term fuzzy logic was introduced with the 1965 proposal of fuzzy set theory by
LotfiZadeh.
• Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth values of variables may be
any real number between 0 and 1. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth,
where the truth value may range between completely true and completely false. By
contrast, in Boolean logic, the truth values of variables may only be the integer values 0
or 1. Furthermore, when linguistic variables are used, these degrees may be managed by
specific (membership) functions.

Why Should We Use Fuzzy Why Should We Use Fuzzy Controllers:

• Very robust
• Can be easily modified
• Can use multiple inputs and outputs sources
• Much simpler than its predecessors (linear algebraic equations)
• Very quick and cheaper to implement

Early application of fuzzy logic:

• The fuzzy logic was implemented in Japan. The first notable application was on the high-
speed train in Sendai, in which fuzzy logic was able to improve the economy, comfort,
and precision of the ride.
• It has also been used in recognition of hand written symbols in Sony pocket computers,
flight aid for helicopters, controlling of subway systems in order to improve driving
comfort, precision of halting, and power economy, improved fuel consumption for
automobiles, single-button control for washing machines, automatic motor control for
vacuum cleaners with recognition of surface condition and degree of soiling, and
prediction systems for early recognition of earthquakes through the Institute of
Seismology Bureau of Meteorology, Japan.
 Artificial neutral network
Introduction:
The simplest definition of a neural network, more properly referred to as an 'artificial' neural
network (ANN), is provided by the inventor of one of the first neuro computers, Dr. Robert
Hecht-Nielsen. He defines a neural network as: "...a computing system made up of a number of
simple, highly interconnected processing elements, which process information by their dynamic
state response to external inputs. ANNs are processing devices (algorithms or actual hardware)
that are loosely modeled after the neuronal structure of the mammalian cerebral cortex but on
much smaller scales. A large ANN might have hundreds or thousands of processor units,
whereas a mammalian brain has billions of neurons with a corresponding increase in magnitude
of their overall interaction and emergent behavior. Although ANN researchers are generally not
concerned with whether their networks accurately resemble biological systems, some have. For
example, researchers have accurately simulated the function of the retina and modeled the eye
rather well.

Difference between From Conventional Computing and ANN:

To better understand artificial neural computing it is important to know first how a conventional
'serial' computer and it's software process information. A serial computer has a central processor
that can address an array of memory locations where data and instructions are stored.
Computations are made by the processor reading an instruction as well as any data the
instruction requires from memory addresses, the instruction is then executed and the results are
saved in a specified memory location as required. In a serial system (and a standard parallel one
as well) the computational steps are deterministic, sequential and logical, and the state of a given
variable can be tracked from one operation to another.
In comparison, ANNs are not sequential or necessarily deterministic. There are no complex
central processors, rather there are many simple ones which generally do nothing more than take
the weighted sum of their inputs from other processors. ANNs do not execute programmed
instructions; they respond in parallel (either simulated or actual) to the pattern of inputs
presented to it. There are also no separate memory addresses for storing data. Instead,
information is contained in the overall activation 'state' of the network. 'Knowledge' is thus
represented by the network itself, which is quite literally more than the sum of its individual
components.

Applications of Neural Networks:

Neural networks are universal approximators, and they work best if the system we are using
them to model has a high tolerance to error. However they work very well for:
• Capturing associations or discovering regularities within a set of patterns;
• Where the volume, number of variables or diversity of the data is very great;
• The relationships between variables are vaguely understood; or,
• The relationships are difficult to describe adequately with conventional approaches.

Limitations:
There are many advantages and limitations to neural network analysis In reference to back
propagational networks , there are some specific issues Back propagational neural networks (and
many other types of networks) are in a sense the ultimate 'black boxes'. Apart from defining the
general architecture of a network and perhaps initially seeding it with a random numbers, the
user has no other role than to feed it input and watch it train and await the output. In fact, it has
been said that with back propagation, "you almost don't know what you're doing". Some
software freely available software packages (NevProp, bp, Mactivation) do allow the user to
sample the networks 'progress' at regular time intervals, but the learning itself progresses on its
own. The final product of this activity is a trained network that provides no equations or
coefficients defining a relationship (as in regression) beyond it's own internal mathematics. The
network 'IS' the final equation of the relationship.
• Back propagational networks also tend to be slower to train than other types of networks
and sometimes require thousands of epochs. If run on a truly parallel computer system
this issue is not really a problem, but if the BPNN is being simulated on standard serial
machine (i.e. a single SPARC, Mac or PC) training can take some time. This is because
the machines CPU must compute the function of each node and connection separately,
which can be problematic in very large networks with a large amount of data. However,
the speed of most current machines is such that this is typically not much of an issue.

Advantages over Conventional Techniques:

Depending on the nature of the application and the strength of the internal data patterns we can
generally expect a network to train quite well. This applies to problems where the relationships
may be quite dynamic or non-linear. ANNs provide an analytical alternative to conventional
techniques which are often limited by strict assumptions of normality, linearity, variable
independence etc. Because an ANN can capture many kinds of relationships it allows the user to
quickly and relatively easily model phenomena which otherwise may have been very difficult or
impossible to explain otherwise.

Upon completion Students will be able to: -

Describe the advanced control system used in industry

Student Activity:
Understanding, Applying

Teaching Learning Material:-

Notes

Quizzes:
Explain one application of each of above concepts in industry.