15th Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control
  Barcelona, 21–26 July 2002 
NONLINEAR ADAPTIVE CONTROL USING NONPARAMETRIC GAUSSIAN PROCESS PRIOR MODELS
Roderick Murray-Smith* Daniel Sbarbaro**
* Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow
G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK. & Hamilton Institute, NUI Maynooth, Ireland
E-mail: rod@dcs.gla.ac.uk
** Departamento de Ingenieriá Eléctrica, Universidad de Concepción,
Chile. E-mail: dsbarbar@die.udec.cl

Nonparametric Gaussian Process prior models, taken from Bayesian statistics methodology are used to implement a nonlinear adaptive control law. The expected value of a quadratic cost function is minimised, without ignoring the variance of the model predictions. This leads to implicit regularisation of the control signal (caution), and excitation of the system. The controller has dual features, since it is both tracking a reference signal and learning a model of the system from observed responses. The general method and its main features are illustrated on a simulation example.
Keywords: Gaussian process priors, nonparametric models, dual control, nonlinear model-based predictive control
Session slot T-Mo-M03: Mathematical Methods in Adaptive Control/Area code 3b : Adaptive Control and Tuning