Continuous-time adaptive control of systems with unknown backlash

This paper addresses one of the nondifferentiable nonlinearities which appear very often in industrial control applications: backlash. The authors first present a right inverse of backlash and then give one of its possible implementations. Characteristics like backlash are seldom known, so an adaptive version of the authors´ backlash inverse is more suitable for applications. The authors develop an adaptive backlash inverse scheme and apply it to feedback control of a known linear plant with an unknown backlash at its input. The authors use simulation results to illustrate achieved performance improvements.