Adaptive control of printing devices using fractional-order hold circuits adjusted through neural networks

A connectionist method for autotuning the free parameter of a fractional-order hold (FROH) circuit in order to improve the performance of the digitally controlled systems is proposed. Such a technique employs multilayer perceptrons to approximate the mapping between the sampling period/continuous-time parameters of the estimated plant and the optimal value of the FROH adjustable gain. In this way, adaptive discretization systems to improve the stability properties of the resulting discrete-time zeros are implemented. Simulation results are presented in order to illustrate the properties of the complete system applied to two actual digitally controlled printing devices (HP 7090A and low-cost computer printer).