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Summary: Steer‐by‐wire (SBW) systems are considered as one of the most significant innovations among the technologies developed for advanced driver‐assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. The main control challenge in a SBW system is to follow the steering commands in the face of parametric uncertainties and external disturbances; crucially, perturbations in inertial parameters and damping forces give rise to state‐dependent uncertainties, which cannot be bounded a priori by a constant. However, the state‐of‐the‐art control methods of SBW system rely on a priori bounded uncertainties, and thus, become inapplicable when state‐dependent dynamics become unknown. This work, to the best of the authors' knowledge for the first time, proposes an adaptive control framework that can tackle the state‐dependent uncertainties and external disturbances in a typical SBW system without any a priori knowledge of their structures and of their bounds. The stability of the closed‐loop system is studied analytically via uniformly ultimately bounded notion and the effectiveness of the proposed solution is verified via simulations against the state‐of‐the‐art solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A consideration of actuator saturation is an important aspect to study the effectiveness of a designed controller in practice. However, the conventional Lyapunov theory-based design is not always suitable to analyze the quantitative behavior of closed-loop system. This article presents a time-scale redesign-based saturated tracking controller for a class of feedback linearizable multi-input–multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear systems. The proposed controller is built upon the frameworks of contraction and partial contraction theories which ensures that bounded tracking performance as well as quantify the steady-state error bounds in terms of the various control design parameters. Notably, in contrast to the existing Lyapunov-method-based designs, the proposed approach allows to tune the controller performance without arbitrary reduction of singular perturbation parameters. Therefore, the vulnerability of the controller toward actuator saturation and noise, due to the ill-effects of high-gains stemming from the conventional high-gain controllers, are reduced. The extensive experimental results using a wheeled mobile robot are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-area load frequency control (LFC) selects and controls a few generators in each area of the power system in an effort to dampen inter-area frequency oscillations. To effectively dampen such oscillations, it is required to enhance and lower the control activity dynamically during operation, so as to adapt to changing circumstances. Changing circumstances should cover not only parametric uncertainties and unmodelled dynamics (e.g. aggregated area dynamics and bus dynamics), but also the increasing structural flexibility of modern power systems (e.g. protection mechanisms against faults and cyber-attacks, or topology reconfiguration mechanisms for demand response). As formal stability guarantees around such an attractive adaptive multi-area LFC concept are still lacking, this work proposes framework in which adaptation and switching are combined in a provably stable way to handle parametric uncertainty, unmodelled dynamics, and dynamical interconnections of the power system. Stability is studied in the Lyapunov theory sense using the standard structure-preserving modelling approach, and the resulting adaptive multi-area LFC design is validated using an IEEE 39-bus benchmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes an adaptive‐robust maneuvering control framework for a planar snake robot under the influence of parameter uncertainties. The entire control objective of maneuvering control can be viewed as the simultaneous establishments of two goals: one to maintain a time‐varying body shape of the snake robot for consistent motion (called the outer layer) and the other dealing with the velocity and head‐angle tracking of the same (called the inner layer). Unknown variations in the ground friction coefficients have been considered to be the primary source of time‐varying uncertainties which affects the control performance in both the layers. Accordingly, an artificial time delay‐based adaptive‐robust control (ARC) framework, dual adaptive‐robust time‐delayed control (ARTDC), is proposed. The term dual signifies simultaneous application of ARTDC for the outer as well as the inner layer. ARTDC comprises of two segments: an artificial time delay‐based time‐delayed estimation (TDE) part and an ARC part. While TDE approximates the completely unknown friction forces, the ARC tackles the approximation error arising from the TDE. More importantly, compared with the existing ARC methodologies, the proposed ARTDC neither presumes the overall uncertainty to be upper bounded by a constant nor requires any prior knowledge of the bound of uncertainty to implement the controller. A Lyapunov function‐based method has been adopted for analyzing the stability of the closed‐loop system. Simulation studies affirm the improved performance of the ARTDC in contrast to the classical artificial delay‐based methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adaptive sliding mode control technique relaxes the assumption of known bound of the disturbance in discrete-time systems. However, the existing technique of gain adaptation in discrete-time sliding mode control has issues of gain overestimation and underestimation. Therefore, this paper proposes a technique to adapt the switching gain such that the adaptive gain can tackle the uncertainty without any knowledge of the bound of uncertainty while overcoming the over- and under-estimation problems of switching gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncertainty and disturbance are common in a planar snake robot model due to its structural complexity and variation in system parameters. To achieve efficient head angle and velocity tracking with least computational complexity and unknown uncertainty bounds, a time-delayed control (TDC) scheme has been presented in this paper. A Serpenoid gait function is being tracked by the joint angles utilizing virtual holonomic constraints (VHCs) method. The first layer of TDC has been proposed for stabilizing the VHC dynamics to the origin. Once the VHCs are satisfied, the system is said to be on the constraint manifold. The second layer of TDC has been applied to an output system defined over the reduced order dynamics on the constrained manifold. To establish the robustness of the control approach through simulation, uncertainty in the friction coefficients is considered to be time-varying emulating change in the ground conditions. Simulation results and Lyapunov stability analysis affirm the uniformly ultimately bounded stability of the robot employing the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new adaptive-robust control (ARC) strategy for a tracking control problem of a class of uncertain Euler–Lagrange systems. The proposed adaptive-robust time-delay control (ARTDC) amalgamates the ARC strategy with the time-delay control (TDC). It comprises three parts: a time-delay estimation part, a desired dynamics injection part, and an adaptive-robust part. The main feature of the proposed ARTDC is that it does not involve any threshold value in its adaptive law; thus, it allows the switching gain to increase or decrease whenever the error trajectories move away or close to the switching surface, respectively. Thus, compared with the existing ARC schemes, ARTDC is able to alleviate the over- and underestimation problems of the switching gain. Moreover, the stability analysis of ARTDC provides an upper bound for the selection of sampling interval and its relation with controller gains. The proposed ARTDC shows improved tracking performance compared with the TDC and the existing adaptive sliding-mode control in simulations as well as in experiments with a multiple-degree-of-freedom system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Doing Business reports have evoked an intense policy debate about whether countries should simplify regulatory rules or make them more stringent. We argue that doing business in developing countries is based on deals struck between firms and the state, rather than rules. We show that there is a weak relationship between rules and deals, and at low levels of state capability, more stringent rules leading to less compliance, rather than more. We provide a diagnostic approach to rules reform where the appropriate reform depend on the level of stringency of the rules, and the level of its state capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the presence of unmodelled dynamics and uncertainties with no a priori constant bounds, conventional robust adaptation strategies for switched systems cannot allow the control gains of inactive subsystems to remain constant during inactive intervals: vanishing gains are typically required in order to prove bounded stability. As a consequence, these strategies, known in literature as leakage-based adaptive methods, might introduce poor transients at each switching instant. Leakage-based adaptive control becomes even more problematic in the switched nonlinear case, where non-conservative state-dependent upper bounds for uncertainties and unmodelled dynamics are required. This work shows that, for a class of switched Euler–Lagrange systems, such difficulties can be mitigated: a novel leakage-based stable mechanism is introduced which allows the gains of inactive subsystems to remain constant. At the same time, unmodelled dynamics and uncertainties with no a priori bounds can be handled by a quadratic state-dependent upper bound structure that reduces conservativeness as compared to state-of-the-art structures. The proposed design is validated analytically and its performance is studied in simulation with a pick-and-place robotic manipulator example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Available control methods for underactuated Euler–Lagrange (EL) systems rely on structure-specific constraints that may be appropriate for some systems, but restrictive for others. A generalized (structure-independent) control framework is to a large extent missing, especially in the presence of uncertainty. This paper introduces an adaptive-robust control framework for a quite general class of uncertain underactuated EL systems. Compared to existing literature, the important attributes of the proposed solution are: (i) avoiding structure-specific restrictions, namely, symmetry condition property of the mass matrix, and a priori bounds on non-actuated states or state derivatives; (ii) considering Coriolis, centripetal, friction and gravity terms to be unknown, while only requiring the knowledge of maximum perturbation around a nominal value of the mass matrix; (iii) handling state-dependent uncertainties irrespective of their linear or nonlinear in parameters structure. These features significantly widen the range of underactuated EL systems the proposed solution can handle in comparison to the available methods. Stability is studied analytically and the performance is verified in simulation using offshore boom crane dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptive Sliding Mode Control (ASMC) aims to adapt the switching gain in such a way to cope with possibly unknown uncertainty. In state-of-the-art ASMC methods, a priori boundedness of the uncertainty is crucial to ensure boundedness for the switching gain and uniformly ultimately boundedness. A priori bounded uncertainty might impose a priori bounds on the system state before obtaining closed-loop stability. A design removing this assumption is still missing in literature. A positive answer to this quest is given by this note where a novel ASMC methodology is proposed which does not require a priori bounded uncertainty. An illustrative example is presented to highlight the main features of the approach, after which a general class of Euler–Lagrange systems is taken as a case study to show the applicability of the proposed design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The actual performance of model-based path-following methods for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) shows considerable dependence on the wind knowledge and on the fidelity of the dynamic model used for design. This study analyzes and demonstrates the performance of an adaptive vector field (VF) control law which can compensate for the lack of knowledge of the wind vector and for the presence of unmodeled course angle dynamics. Extensive simulation experiments, calibrated on a commercial fixed-wing UAV and proven to be realistic, show that the new VF method can better cope with uncertainties than its standard version. In fact, while the standard VF approach works perfectly for ideal first-order course angle dynamics (and perfect knowledge of the wind vector), its performance degrades in the presence of unknown wind or unmodeled course angle dynamics. On the other hand, the estimation mechanism of the proposed adaptive VF effectively compensates for wind uncertainty and unmodeled dynamics, sensibly reducing the path-following error as compared to the standard VF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recursive least squares (RLS) for control, which is tackled by Baldi, Zhang, and Liu in the framework of Recursive Least Squares-Temporal Difference (RLS-TD), using an instrumental variable perspective. As compared to conventional adaptive control, robust adaptive control aims to provide robustness against unmodeled dynamics, coupling effects, and other endogenous and exogenous disturbances. State-dependent uncertainties without a priori bounds: Shukla, Roy, and Gupta consider an adaptive control problem in which the uncertainties cannot be bounded a priori by any constant, but should be tackled in their state-dependent nature. [Extracted from the article]

In this article, a novel adaptive trajectory tracking controller is designed for a payload-carrying spacecraft under full state constraints. The proposed controller can tackle state-dependent uncertainties without a priori knowledge of their structures and upper bounds. The controller ensures time-varying constraints on all states and their time derivatives. The closed-loop stability of the proposed scheme is verified analytically via the Lyapunov method, and real-life experiments using a robotic testbed validated the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive controller over the state-of-the-art. • An adaptive controller for a spacecraft that tackles variations in dynamics. • The state constraints are ensured using a barrier Lyapunov function. • The state constraints are designed to be time-varying. • The stability of the controller is proved using the Lyapunov method. • The controller's performance is verified using a floating robotic testbed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]