ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with some important landmarks, some early work, and the surveys, bibliographies, and books that have come out on adaptive control. It considers the important questions regarding why adaptive control is to be used, while at the same time emphasizing the need for probing whether conventional control schemes can be applied to solve the problem involved satisfactorily. Adaptive control is an important area of modern control, dealing as it does with the control of systems in the presence of uncertainties, structural perturbations, and environmental variations. The chapter discusses the essential aspects of adaptive control, considers different classifications of adaptive control schemes, and introduces the two main approaches: model-reference adaptive control systems and self-tuning regulators. Model reference adaptive control systems are mostly applied in deterministic systems, whereas there has been a considerable progress in the development of stochastic self-tuning regulators.