Nonlinear and adaptive control of buck power converters

This paper focuses on the problem of controlling DC-to-DC switched power converters of Buck type. The system nonlinear feature is coped with by resorting to the backstepping control approach. Both adaptive and nonadaptive versions are designed and shown to yield quite interesting tracking and robustness performances. A comparison study shows that backstepping nonlinear controllers perform as well as passivity-based controllers. For both, the choice of design parameters proves to be crucial for achieving robustness with respect to load resistance variations. From this viewpoint, adaptive backstepping controllers are more interesting as they prove to be less sensitive to design parameters.