Challenges of adaptive control–past, permanent and future

This paper reviews three different types of challenges to adaptive control. The first group comprises challenges met in the subject’s development. They include difficulties associated with the MIT rule, bursting, the Rohr’s counterexample and unplanned instability in iterative identification and control. An understanding of these phenomena and mitigating strategies are now available. The second group comprises difficulties that are intrinsic to virtually any adaptive control algorithm, and that have frequently been overlooked. For example, if a plant is unknown, and a control objective is set, the objective may in practical terms be unachievable, and any adaptive control algorithm needs to deal with that possibility. The third group comprises some issues to which researchers are currently devoting significant attention, including multiple model adaptive control and model-free design.