Fractionalization: A New Tool for Robust Adaptive Control of Noisy Plants

Recently, many research works have focused on fractional order control (FOC) and fractional adaptive control. It has been proven to be a good tool for improving the plant dynamics with respect to response time and disturbance rejection. In this paper we propose a new approach for adaptive robust control by fractionalizing an integer order integrator in the classical model reference adaptive control (MRAC) scheme. The implementation of the fractionalized terms is realized by mean of the well established numerical approximation methods. Illustrative simulation examples show that the disturbance rejection has been improved by 50%. This approach can also be generalized to a wide range of control methods.