A CONSTRUCTION METHOD OF MULTIPLE CONTROL SYSTEMS USING PARTIAL KNOWLEDGE UPON SYSTEM DYNAMICS

  • Published : 1999.10.01

Abstract

This paper presents an effective construction method of adaptive multiple control systems utilizing some knowledge upon the plants. The adaptive multiple control system operates plants un-der widely changing environmental conditions. The adaptive multiple control system is composed of a family of candidate controllers together with a supervisor. The system does not require any identification schemes of environmental conditions. Monitoring outputs of the plant, the supervisor switches from one candidate controller to another, The basic ideas of adaptation are as follows: (1)each candidate controller is prepared for each environmental condition in advance; (2)the supervise. applies a sequence of speculative controls to the plant with candidate controllers just after the start of control or just after the detection of a change in the environmental condition. Each candidate controller can keep the system stable during one-step period of the speculative control and the most appropriate candidate controller for the environmental condition to which the system is exposed can be selected before the last trial of speculative control step comes to an end. We proposed a construction method of adaptive multiple control system without any knowledge of plant dynamics and applied the method to a cart-pole balancing problem and a vehicle anti skid braking system. In real applications, as we can often easily obtain a piece of knowledge upon plant dynamics beforehand, we intend to extend the method such that multiple control systems can be efficiently designed using the knowledge. We apply the new idea to the cart-pole balancing problem with variable length of the pole. The simulation experiments lead us to the conclusion that the new attempt can reduce the manpower to design the candidate controllers for adaptive multiple control systems.

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