Robust continuous-time adaptive control by parameter projection

The problem of adaptive control of a continuous-time plant of arbitrary relative degree, in the presence of bounded disturbances as well as unmodeled dynamics, is addressed. The adaptation considered is the usual gradient update law with parameter projection, the latter being the only robustness enhancement modification employed. It is shown that if the unmodeled dynamics, which consists of multiplicative as well as additive system uncertainty, is small enough, then all the signals in the closed-loop system are bounded. This shows that extra modifications are not necessary for robustness with respect to bounded disturbances and small unmodeled dynamics. In the nominal case, where unmodeled dynamics and disturbances are absent, the asymptotic error in tracking a given reference signal is zero. Moreover, the performance of the adaptive controller is also robust