Newton-method based iterative learning control for sampled nonlinear systems

Iterative learning control (ILC) has been an intensely researched area. Significant progress has been achieved in terms of both theory and applications of ILC to industrial problems. This paper focuses on applying ILC to sampled nonlinear systems in continuous time domain. The main result of this paper is a new nonlinear ILC algorithm that utilizes a special form of the Newton method. This special form allows one to decompose the original nonlinear ILC problem into a sequence of linear time-varying ILC problems. Conditions for the semi-local convergence of the new ILC algorithm are also established.