Biography
Biography: Timothy Sands
Abstract
Automated control courses tend to strongly emphasize feedback control while minimizing or neglecting treatment of feedforward
controls which leads to systems that contain inherent lagging controllers. Furthermore, neglecting feed-forward
controls restrict engineers from taking advantage of adaptive feed-forward techniques oft en adapt control commands based
upon errors tracking trajectories and/or estimation errors. Direct adaptive control techniques typically directly adapt the
control signal without translation of estimated parameters. Indirect adaptive control techniques indirectly adapt the control
signal by translating the estimates of unknown system parameters to formulate a control signal. Th e adaptation rule is derived
using a proof that demonstrates the elimination of tracking errors (the true objective) and demonstrates stability, which is
complicated by the nonlinear closed loop system. Th is presentation will elaborate on such techniques applied to rotational
mechanics with time-varying mass