Adaptive control with variable dead-zone nonlinearities

Abstract : It has been found that fixed error dead-zones is defined in the existing literature result in serious degradation of performance, dur to the conservativeness which characterizes the determination of their width. In this paper, variable width dead-zones are derived for the adaptive control of plants with unmolded dynamics. The derivation makes use of information available about the unmolded dynamics both a priori as well as during the adaptation process, so as to stabilize the adaptive loop and at the same time overcome the conservativeness and performance limitations of fixed-dead zone adaptive or fixed gain controllers. (Author)