Introduction to self-tuning control

Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to Part 2 of the thesis. The fundamental reasons for the use of feedback control (as opposed to open-loop control) are reviewed in Section 3.1. The ubiquitous PI control law is discussed in Section 3.2, and its associated problems then lead to the introduction of analytical design, adaptive control and identification in Sections 3.3 and 3.4. A brief history of adaptive control is given in Section 3.5 and the three most widely used approaches to adaptive control (gain scheduling, model reference adaptive control and self-tuning control) are discussed in Section 3.6. Previous approaches to self-tuning control are briefly reviewed in Section 3.7. Finally, the contributions made in Chapter 4 in the polynomial equation approach to self-tuning control are outlined.