Jour of Adv Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, Vol.

10, 13-Special Issue, 2018

A Study on Remote Discrete Model

Reference Adaptive Control for an
Uncertain System in the Presence of Time
Delay
[1]
Trong Trung Nguyen, [1]Van Tu Duong, [2]Huy Hung Nguyen, [3] Thanh Phuong Nguyen and
[1]
Viet Thang Tran*
[1]
Vietnam Institute of Electronics, Informatics and Automation,
[2]
Saigon University, [3]Hutech University,

Abstract— This paper proposes a remote model reference adaptive controller for a discrete-time system in the
presence of uncertain dynamic and delay time effects in the measurement and actuation channels. In the control
scheme, the drawback of the control plant with unknown parameters, unknown delay time is overcome by using an
adaptive method for controller parameters. Stability of the closed loop control is achieved by means of discrete-time
Lyapunov’s stability theory. A model reference adaptive based remoted speed controller over the LoRa wireless for a
DC motors used to demonstrate the design objective. The effectiveness of the proposed remoted speed controller was
verified through simulations and experiments.

Index Terms— Discrete time system, model reference adaptive control, remoted controller, LoRa wireless.

I. INTRODUCTION
For decades, a traditional control system has been successfully implemented in industrial applications where
controllers, actuators and sensors are interconnected by directly wired using a point-to-point architecture. In such
architecture, the expanding of physical setup and functionality are limited. A major trend in modern manufacturing
and control system is to design a flexible system which offers a small reconfiguration cost, quick-easy maintenance
and more efficient reconfigurability. In this case, an alternative to point-to-point architecture called remoted control
system where controllers, actuators and sensors are interconnected through wireless communication. The remoted
control system offers more efficiency, flexibility and reliability through reduced wiring, installation, maintenance time
and cost. However, the remote control system induces a time delay which can degrade the control performance and
can even cause instability. The time delay is a function of device processing time and a time costed by protocol of used
communication. The characteristic of time delays may be constant, bounded or stochastic. Some existing works
[1]–[3] about the analysis and control improvement are carried out to accommodate the negative effect of time delays.
A Control Server was adopted in [4] to reduce the input-output latency. Cervin et al. [5] was carried out a
feedback-feedforward loop to adjust the sampling period of the control tasks in order to optimize a performance
criterion. The Smith Predictor (SP), proposed by Otto Smith in the 1950s, [6] is one of the most popular methods for
controlling systems with time-delays. However, these type of controllers is not suitable to meet requirement for
uncertain systems which introduces uncertainties and mismatching modeling.
Most practical applications are significant difficulties in attempting to achieve exact modeling and physical
modeling parameters such as inertia of moments, friction force and center of gravity. These uncertainties play a role as
strong key factor considered in design of control systems to obtain the good performance control and system stability.
Some previous works [7]–[11] studied on a model reference adaptive controller in continuous-time system control
where the negative effect of uncertain and mismatch modeling can be accommodated by the adaptation update laws of
the utilized controllers. However, in a foundation using wireless communication introduced time delays, a developed
controller should be subjected to discrete-time to take the effect of time delays account into the system stability.
This paper studies on the design of remote discrete-time model reference adaptive controller for an uncertain
system in the presence of time delay. Inspired from Smith Predictor and adaptive control, the studied controller not
only predicts the future states of the control system affected by time delay but also overcomes the drawbacks of
uncertain system. As well the studied controller introduces an applicability on computer implementation which is
required for almost practical application. A speed controller for a DC motor through Lora wireless communication is
utilized to analysis the characteristic in transient/steady state phases and control performance of the studied controller
which is implemented on a computer. An Arduino 2560 is adopted to drive the DC motor by receiving commands and
to send sensor signals to the central computer-based controller through Lora communication. The simulation and

98
*Corresponding Author: Van Tu Duong
Article History: Received: October 01, 2018, Revised: November 05, 2018, Accepted: December 10, 2018
Jour of Adv Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, Vol. 10, 13-Special Issue, 2018

experimental results on the control plant of DC motor speed controller verify the good performance control of the
studied controller.

II. PROBLEM FORMULATION

Let consider a continuous-time system in given by:
x (t ) = Ax (t ) + Bu (t ) (1)
where A, B are constant parameter matrices assumed to be unknown and x(t ), u(t ) are the state and the control
input of the control plant, respectively.
Since the control plant is controlled through a wireless communication which introduces time delay, it is necessary
to achieve a discrete-time control plant. By defining  ca is a controller to actuator delay time and  ca is a sensor to
controller delay time, the overall time delay  of the discrete system using a remote controller is expressed by:
 =  ca +  sc (2)
It assumes that the random time delay  less than one sampling period h (  h) as show in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Remote controller induced time delay

The system described by Eq. (1) can be expressed in discrete-time as follows [12]:
x(( k + 1)h) = x( kh) + 0 ( )u (kh) + 1 ( )u (( k − 1) h)
(3)
where
 = e Ah
h −
0 ( ) = e Bds
As
0
h
 ( ) =  e Bds
1
As
 h−

III. ADAPTIVE CONTROLLER OF A TIME DELAY SYSTEM

Let consider a modified reference model expressed in discrete-time as follows:
xm (k + 1) =  m xm (k ) + m0 r (k − 1) + m1 r (k ) (4)
where xm (k ) is the state of the modified reference model, r (k ) is a piecewise constant reference input and  m
are a Hurwitz matrix.
A discrete-time adaptive controller which stabilizes the control plant described in Eq. (3) is given by:
u ( k ) = −  
ˆ −1 ( k ) 
ˆ (k ) x(k ) + 
x
ˆ ( k )u ( k − 1)


−ˆ 0 ( k ) r ( k − 1) − 
r
ˆ 1 (k )r (k )
r  (5)

ˆ (k ) , 
where  ˆ (k ) ,  ˆ (k ) ,  ˆ 1 ( k ) are adjusted adaptation parameters.
ˆ 0 (k ) and 
 x  r r

A tracking error vector is defined as the difference between the states of Eq. (3) and the state of the modified
reference model as follows:
e( k ) = x ( k ) − x m ( k )
(6)
e(k + 1) = x( k + 1) − xm ( k + 1)
Substitutes Eqs. (3–5) into Eq. (6), it yields:
e(k + 1) = ( −  m ) x(k ) +  m e(k )
+ 0u (k − 1) + 1u (k ) (7)
+ m0 r (k − 1) + m1 r (k )
In order to obtain the control objective, this condition must hold lim k → x(k ) = xm (k ) or in other words
lim k → e(k ) = 0 , therefore, assuming that there exists a  x ,   ,  ,  0r , 1r and a known system parameter n
such that

99
*Corresponding Author: Van Tu Duong
Article History: Received: October 01, 2018, Revised: November 05, 2018, Accepted: December 10, 2018
Jour of Adv Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, Vol. 10, 13-Special Issue, 2018

 − n  x =  m , m0 = −n  0r
0 = n  , m1 = −n 1r (8)
1 = n 
By substituting Eq. (8) in Eq. (7) and simplifying it leads to this form
e( k + 1) =  m e( k ) + n  x x( k ) + n  u ( k − 1)
(9)
+ n  u ( k ) + n  0r r ( k − 1) + n 1r r ( k )
~ ~
ˆ ,  ~
ˆ ,  ~0
ˆ ,  ˆ0
Defining the estimation errors as  x (k ) =  x −  x  ( k ) =  −   ( k ) =  −  r (k ) =  r −  r
0

~ ˆ 1 and using these definitions as well as the adaptive controller of Eq. (5), the system of Eq. (9)
1r (k ) = 1r −  r

becomes
~ ~
e( k + 1) =  m e( k ) + n  x ( k ) x(k ) + n  ( k )u ( k − 1)
~ ~
+ n  (k )u ( k ) + n  0r ( k ) r ( k − 1)
~1
+ n  r (k ) r ( k ) (10)
 ~ ~
=  m e(k ) + n  x ( k ) x( k ) +  ( k )u ( k − 1)
~ ~ ~

+  (k )u ( k ) +  0r (k ) r ( k − 1) + 1r ( k ) r (k )
By defining a  ~
~ ~
(k − 1) =  x (k )  (k )  (k ) 0r
~ ~ ~

1r and
 (k − 1) = x(k ) u (k − 1) u (k ) r (k − 1) r (k ) , the system of Eq. (10) can be expressed by
T

~
e(k + 1) =  m e(k ) + n  (k − 1) T (k − 1) (11)
In order to find out the adaptation law, the following is defined
~
z (k + 1) =  (k − 1) T (k − 1) (12)
The adaptation laws can be given by
ˆ (k + 1) = 
 ˆ (k − 1) +  P(k + 1) (k − 1) z T (k + 1) (13)
k
P(k + 1) = P(k − 1)
P(k − 1) (k − 1) T ( k − 1) P(k − 1) (14)
− k
1 +  k  T (k − 1) P(k − 1) (k − 1)
ˆ (k ) is a estimation error and P is the symmetric positive-definite coefficient
where  k is a positive coefficient,  k

which has the properties [13]

P−1 (k + 1) = P−1 (k − 1) +  k (k − 1) T (k − 1) (15)
 T (k − 1) P(k + 1) (k − 1) =
 T (k − 1) P(k − 1) (k − 1) (16)
1 +  k  (k − 1) P(k − 1) (k − 1)
T

The block diagram of the control system is shown in Figure 2. The reference input of the control plant is sent both
model reference systems and discrete model reference adaptive controller. The adaptation laws are composed of the
signal from the state error which is defined as the difference between the output of the system and the output of the
model reference system, the input control and the reference input.

Figure 2. Block diagram of control system

IV. EXPERIMENT RESULTS

An experimental setup consisting of a DC motor equipped by a mobile robot wheel that is controlled by an Arduino
MEGA2560 R3 was used to investigate the quality of the performance control of the proposed controller and some of
the results are presented in this section. The DC motor operates at 24 Volts and driven by a H-bridge controller which
is compatible with Arduino platform. the speed of the robot wheel is measured by a differential encoder with
resolution of 1000ppr. The proposed controller is implemented on a personal computer for sending the command
input and receiving the sensor signal from the Arduino board through a Lora wireless communication. A schematic of
the control system is shown as Figure 3.
The sampling period used for both computers based controller and Arduino based controller is every
100
*Corresponding Author: Van Tu Duong
Article History: Received: October 01, 2018, Revised: November 05, 2018, Accepted: December 10, 2018
Jour of Adv Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, Vol. 10, 13-Special Issue, 2018

50milliseconds. In the first study, the speed of the robot wheel must follow a step trajectory reference with the
amplitude of 500 pulse/s (0.5 round per second) for the first 10 seconds, that of 1500 pulse/s (1.5 round per second)
for next 10 seconds, that of 1000 pulse/s (1 round per second) for next 10 seconds, and that of 500 pulse/s for last 10
seconds. In the second study, the speed of the robot wheel must follow a trapezoidal trajectory reference composed of
a ramp function with a slope of 0.785 rad and a step function with the amplitude of 1000 pulse/s for 10 seconds. The
sketch of the experimental setup is shown in Figure 4. The experimental setup is a part of a mobile robot known as
automated guide vehicle (AGV). In this paper, there is only focus on test rig composed of one DC motor, one robot
driving wheel and an encoder for studying the proposed controller.

Figure 3. Schematic of the control system

Figure 4. Sketch experimental setup

Figure 5 depicts the speed of the robot wheel under the controlling of the proposed controller following the step
trajectory reference. The reference input is expressed in dash line while the speed output of the control system is
101
*Corresponding Author: Van Tu Duong
Article History: Received: October 01, 2018, Revised: November 05, 2018, Accepted: December 10, 2018
Jour of Adv Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, Vol. 10, 13-Special Issue, 2018

expressed in solid line. Due to the latency of the remote control and processing time of device, the speed output of the
control system cannot track closely the reference input in the transient phase and changing the amplitude of the
reference input suddenly.

Figure 5. The speed output of the control system with respect to

step trajectory reference.
Figure 6 expresses the speed of the robot wheel under the controlling of the proposed controller tracks the
trapezoidal trajectory reference. The speed output of the control system is almost tracking closely to the reference
input in both transient phase and stead-state phase. However, since the induced delay of the remote controller,
processing time of device and low resolution of encoder, the speed output is not smoothly as desired.

Figure 6. The speed output of the control system with respect

to trapezoidal trajectory reference.

V. CONCLUSIONS
The remote discrete model reference adaptive control represents an industrial real-time application for uncertain
time delay systems that can benefit from the advantage provided by the Lora wireless communication. However, the
typical feature of the remote controller induced delays which may even cause to the instability of the control system.
As well, a complex structure of uncertain practical system in industrial application introduces mismatch modeling and
uncertainties that may prevent the good performance tracking of the implemented controller. This paper studied a
discrete type of model reference adaptive controller in for a remote control system using Lora wireless
communication. The adaptive controller and the adjusted adaptive control parameters can accommodate the negative
effect of the time delay, while the drawbacks of mismatch modeling and uncertainties of the control plant were
overcome by the adaptation laws.
Some of the experimental results were carried out to analyze the quality control of the proposed controller studied
on the test rig composed of DC motor and a driving mobile robot wheel. It is shown that the speed of the mobile robot
wheel converged to both of the desired step trajectory reference and the desired trapezoidal trajectory reference. The
paper demonstrated that the utilize of the proposed controller can improve the good tracking performance of the
discrete type of systems, in the presence of time delay, mismatch modeling and uncertainties.
For future works, research on the case of the multi of two-wheeled mobile robots are controlled by a remote discrete
model reference adaptive controller is now progress.

102
*Corresponding Author: Van Tu Duong
Article History: Received: October 01, 2018, Revised: November 05, 2018, Accepted: December 10, 2018
Jour of Adv Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, Vol. 10, 13-Special Issue, 2018

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103
*Corresponding Author: Van Tu Duong
Article History: Received: October 01, 2018, Revised: November 05, 2018, Accepted: December 10, 2018