Stability analysis of a combined direct and variable structure adaptive control

This study presents the proofs of robust stability of a direct adaptive controller with a variable structure (VS) parcel. The control law parameters are adjusted based on a method proposed by Narendra and Boškvič (1990). In this approach, two sets of parameters must be obtained. One set is used to attain the control objective which is, in this case, to track the output of a reference model as closely as possible. The other set is of VS type, which is used to improve performance and robustness. A slight modification of the adaptive law for the VS parameters with proofs of robust stability is proposed here. With this modified law, all mathematical proofs already existing in the literature for robust direct adaptive controllers can be extended to the case under study. The combined controller is applied to a single input single output linear time invariant (SISO LTI) plant with unmodelled dynamics of multiplicative and additive types. It is proven that the combined controller can arbitrarily improve the convergence of the error while keeping the system robustness, if compared to the non-combined case. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed control strategy.