Composite adaptive control for Euler–Lagrange systems with additive disturbances

In a typical adaptive update law, the rate of adaptation is generally a function of the state feedback error. Ideally, the adaptive update law would also include some feedback of the parameter estimation error. The desire to include some measurable form of the parameter estimation error in the adaptation law resulted in the development of composite adaptive update laws that are functions of a prediction error and the state feedback. In all previous composite adaptive controllers, the formulation of the prediction error is predicated on the critical assumption that the system uncertainty is linear in the uncertain parameters (LP uncertainty). The presence of additive disturbances that are not LP would destroy the prediction error formulation and stability analysis arguments in previous results. In this paper, a new prediction error formulation is constructed through the use of a recently developed Robust Integral of the Sign of the Error (RISE) technique. The contribution of this design and associated stability analysis is that the prediction error can be developed even with disturbances that do not satisfy the LP assumption (e.g., additive bounded disturbances). A composite adaptive controller is developed for a general MIMO Euler–Lagrange system with mixed structured (i.e., LP) and unstructured uncertainties. A Lyapunov-based stability analysis is used to derive sufficient gain conditions under which the proposed controller yields semi-global asymptotic tracking. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the approach.