High performance adaptive control in the presence of time delays

Many potential applications of adaptive control, such as adaptive flight control systems, require that the controller have high performance, stability guarantees, and robustness to time delays. These requirements typically lead to engineering trade-offs, such as a trade-off between performance and robustness. In this paper, we examine several modifications to the typical direct model reference adaptive control (MRAC) approach which can be used to achieve higher performance as well as higher levels of robustness. A new Time Delay Resistant (TDR) adaptive control framework is proposed using a combination of several modifications to MRAC. The various modifications to MRAC, as well as the TDR adaptive controller are applied to the control of longitudinal dynamics of an aerial vehicle in simulation.