Towards an Adaptive Control Concept for Unknown Nonlinear MIMO Systems

The design of an accurate model often appears as the most challenging tasks for control engineers especially focusing to the control of nonlinear systems with unknown parameters or effects to be identified in parallel. For this reason, development of model-free control methods is of increasing importance. The class of model-free control approaches is defined by the non-use of any knowledge about the underlying structure and/or related parameters of the dynamical system. Therefore the major criteria to evaluate model-free control performance are aspects regarding robustness against unknown inputs and disturbances to achieve a suitable tracking performance including ensuring stability. Consequently it is assumed that the system plant model to be controlled is unknown, only the inputs and outputs are used as measurements. In this contribution a modified model-free adaptive approach is given as the extended version of existing model-free adaptive control to improve the performance according to the tracking error at each sample time. Using modified model-free adaptive controller, the control goal can be achieved efficiently without an individual control design process for different kinds unknown nonlinear systems. The main contribution of this paper is to extend the modified model-free adaptive control method to unknown nonlinear multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. A numerical example is shown to demonstrate the successful application and performance of this method.