Robert L. Clark
Dept. of Mech. Eng. and Mater. Sci., Duke Univ., Durham, NC 27708-0300
A hybrid, model-insensitive control algorithm for active damping and control of a persistent disturbance is presented. Direct velocity feedback control is implemented to suppress the transient response of the system and adaptive feedforward control is used to minimize the system response due to a persistent disturbance. A time-averaged gradient descent algorithm was selected to adapt the feedforward filter, rendering the controller model insensitive and thus adaptive for the chosen application. The feedback control loop serves to increase the damping of the controlled structure, decreasing the overall convergence time associated with the adaptive feedforward filter. Thus the integration of the two-control approaches affords increases in performance previously not possible with the adaptive feedforward controller alone.