Decentralized model reference adaptive control without restriction on subsystem relative degrees

When the direct model reference adaptive control (MRAC) scheme with first-order local estimators is employed to design totally decentralized controllers, the stability result can only be applied to a system with all of its nominal subsystem relative degrees less than or equal to two. In this paper, this restriction is relaxed and it is achieved by employing the parameter projection together with static normalization. To implement the local controllers, no a priori knowledge of the subsystem unmodeled dynamics and no information exchange between subsystems are required. Global stability is established for the closed-loop system and small in the mean tracking error is ensured. With this analysis, the class of interactions and subsystem unmodeled dynamics can be enlarged to include those having infinite memory.