This award supports a visit by Dr. Robert L. Kosut of Integrated Systems Incorporated, Santa Clara, California, to the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, to work with Dr. Prof. Brian D.O. Anderson of the Systems Engineering Department, Australian National University, Canberra, on adaptive robust control. The authors will investigate the implications of the classical averaging analysis method to the design of nonlinear adaptive control systems. In connection with this, they will study the problem of robust adaptive control, in which estimated inaccuracy regions for the estimated parameters play an important role in the design. The researchers point out that while it is easy to construct an adaptive system by connecting a design rule and an estimator together, it is very difficult to ensure by analysis that the resulting adaptive system will provide acceptable performance. They plan to eliminate problems from the start by digital control of nonlinear sampled-data systems. They will investigate the performance of the resulting controller in the context of robotic mechanisms. To perform this task, they will use: (1) averaging analysis of adaptive control systems; and (2) adaptive system synthesis via uncertainty estimation. In both cases, they state current results obtained for linear systems, and argue how the same approaches will be used for nonlinear systems.
