Bøger af Iven Mareels

The engineering objective of high performance control using the tools of optimal control theory, robust control theory, and adaptive control theory is more achiev- able now than ever before, and the need has never been greater. Of course, when we use the term high peiformance control we are thinking of achieving this in the real world with all its complexity, uncertainty and variability. Since we do not expect to always achieve our desires, a more complete title for this book could be "e;Towards High Performance Control"e;. To illustrate our task, consider as an example a disk drive tracking system for a portable computer. The better the controller performance in the presence of eccen- tricity uncertainties and external disturbances, such as vibrations when operated in a moving vehicle, the more tracks can be used on the disk and the more memory it has. Many systems today are control system limited and the quest is for high performance in the real world.

Loosely speaking, adaptive systems are designed to deal with, to adapt to, chang- ing environmental conditions whilst maintaining performance objectives. Over the years, the theory of adaptive systems evolved from relatively simple and intuitive concepts to a complex multifaceted theory dealing with stochastic, nonlinear and infinite dimensional systems. This book provides a first introduction to the theory of adaptive systems. The book grew out of a graduate course that the authors taught several times in Australia, Belgium, and The Netherlands for students with an engineering and/or mathemat- ics background. When we taught the course for the first time, we felt that there was a need for a textbook that would introduce the reader to the main aspects of adaptation with emphasis on clarity of presentation and precision rather than on comprehensiveness. The present book tries to serve this need. We expect that the reader will have taken a basic course in linear algebra and mul- tivariable calculus. Apart from the basic concepts borrowed from these areas of mathematics, the book is intended to be self contained.