Life with Pattern Adaptation

This paper presents a human case history of the evolution-to-practice of a distinctive approach to adaptive control against a background of other methods dating back to 1950. This concept, based on pattern recognition, provides direct performance feedback in a natural and intuitive form and guarantees adaptive convergence to satisfactory loop behavior. Recent field experience has shown a new design following this concept to be extremely successful as a trouble-free, general-purpose adaptive controller. Despite the apparent advantages of this concept, it was as slow to come to commercialization as were competing concepts and for many of the same reasons, notably a lack of agreement on realistic benefits of adaptation.