Adaptive control of continuous time systems with convex/concave parametrization (Q1129655)

This paper deals with adaptive control of nonlinear dynamic systems whose state variables are accessible and the nonlinearity in the parameters is either convex or concave. By introducing a tuning function and an adaptive law based on a min-max strategy, it is shown that such systems can be adaptively controlled in a stable manner. Global boundedness of the overall adaptive system and tracking to within a desired precision are established with the new controller. The proposed adaptive control is applied to a precise positioning problem in the presence of nonlinearly parametrized friction dynamics. It is shown that the controller leads to position errors and friction compensation that are orders of magnitude better than those based on estimation of linear parametrizations.