Adaptive control of systems with unknown time delays.

摘要

Control systems, on earth or in outer-space, may exhibit time delays in their dynamic behavior. Aerospace control systems must be able to operate in the presence of time delays both internal to the system and in its inputs and outputs. These delays are often introduced via systems controlled through a network, by information, energy or mass transport phenomena, but can also be caused by computer processing time or by the accumulation of time lags in a number of simple dynamic systems connected in series. When a dynamic system is subject to a time delay, unlike other parameters, this affects the temporal characteristics of the system and exact control over system operation cannot be strictly implemented. Systems with significant time delays are difficult to control using standard feedback controllers. The United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is considering the use of router-based data networks on-board next generation satellites and in decentralized control architectures. This approach has the potential to introduce non-constant and non-deterministic communications delays into feedback control loops that make use of these data networks. The desire for rapid deployment of new spacecraft architectures will also introduce many other control issues as the rigorous measurement, calibration and performance tests usually conducted on spacecraft systems to develop a highly precise dynamic model will need to be drastically shortened due to the desired abbreviated build and launch schedule. Due to limited testing and system identification, the spacecraft model will have uncertainties/perturbations from the actual plant. This will require a controller that can robustly control the non-linear dynamic model with limited plant knowledge. The problems created by the control of time delay systems and the limited plant knowledge nature of the systems of interest leads us to the concept of adaptive control. Adaptive control makes adjustment of the controllers automatically in real time, in order to achieve or to maintain a desired level of performance when the parameters of the plant dynamic model are poorly known or change with time. The focus of this document will be to develop Direct Model Reference Adaptive Control (DMRAC despite limited plant knowledge in the presence of a unknown time delay.