State and Input Constrained Model Reference Adaptive Control

Abstract: Satisfaction of state and input constraints is one of the most critical requirements in control engineering applications. In classical model reference adaptive control (MRAC) formulation, although the states and the input remain bounded, the bound is neither user-defined nor known a-priori. In this paper, an MRAC is developed for multivariable linear time-invariant (LTI) plant with user-defined state and input constraints using a simple saturated control design coupled with a barrier Lyapunov function (BLF). Without any restrictive assumptions that may limit practical implementation, the proposed controller guarantees that both the plant state and the control input remain within a user-defined safe set for all time while simultaneously ensuring that the plant state trajectory tracks the reference model trajectory. The controller ensures that all the closed-loop signals remain bounded and the trajectory tracking error converges to zero asymptotically. Simulation results validate the efficacy of the proposed constrained MRAC in terms of better tracking performance and limited control effort compared to the standard MRAC algorithm.