Utilization of automatic differentiation in control algorithms

Symbolic languages are increasingly being used in the analysis and implementation of control algorithms. Many of these control procedures involve some type of differentiation or Jacobian formulation. Automatic differentiation provides an alternative means of computing this information which is rarely considered in the control literature. This correspondence discusses the use of automatic differentiation. Numerical results comparing the use of automatic differentiation and symbolic approaches in the context of a particular nonlinear control system are given