Accelerated adaptive control of nonlinear uncertain systems

This paper presents an 'accelerated' adaptive control (AAC) for a class of nonlinear uncertain systems with guaranteed well-shaped transient response and controllable tracking process. By invoking an appropriate rate function from a function pool provided into the control law and the adaptive law, a control scheme with double adaptation units is developed, which not only ensures full state zero-error tracking under parametric uncertainties, but also allows the tracking rate of convergence to be explicitly and arbitrarily specifiable so that the tracking error decay rate during the transient period can be made as fast as exponential or even faster. Such feature, seldom observed from most existing tracking designs, is deemed attractive for many important applications.