A Hybrid Autonomous Control Approach

Abstract

A hybrid autonomous control approach for active damping and control of a persistent disturbance is presented. Direct velocity feedback control is coupled with an adaptive feedforward controller to minimize the transient response and that due to a persistent disturbance, respectively. A time-averaged gradient descent algorithm was selected to adapt the feedforward filter, rendering the controller model-insensitive and thus autonomous for the chosen application. The feedback control loop serves to increase the damping of the controlled structure, decreasing the convergence time associated with the adaptive feedforward filter. Thus the integration of the two control approaches affords increases in performance previously not possible with the adaptive feedforward controller alone.