The role of a priori knowledge of plant dynamics in neurocontroller design

The authors modify an earlier neurocontroller architecture so as to guarantee the performance of the neurocontroller. This architecture uses a priori knowledge of the general structure of the system´s dynamics. The knowledge is utilized for the selection of exploratory schedules to excite selected subsets of the dynamics. The controller does not require a priori knowledge of the exact system dynamics, as they are learned online, nor does it assume the existence of an explicit external teacher. The control architecture developed is not limited to tracking of a prespecified trajectory. The architecture is developed for the control of a robot manipulator