Model reference adaptive anti-windup compensation

This paper proposes an anti-windup mechanism for a model reference adaptive control scheme subject to actuator saturation constraints. The proposed compensator has the same architecture as well known non-adaptive schemes, which rely on the assumption that the system model is known fairly accurately. This is in contrast to the adaptive nature of the controller, which assumes that the system (or parts of it) is unknown. The approach proposed here uses of an "estimate" of the system matrices for the anti-windup compensator formulation and modifies the adaptation laws that update the controller gains. It will be observed that if the (unknown) ideal control gain is reached, a type of "model recovery anti-windup" formulation is obtained. In addition, it is shown that if the ideal control signal eventually lies within the control constraints, then, under certain conditions, the system states will converge to those of the reference model as desired. The paper highlights the main challenges involved in the design of anti-windup compensators for model-reference adaptive control systems and demonstrates its success via a flight control simulation.