An Adaptive Feedforward Control Approach for Rejecting Disturbances Acting on Uncertain Linear Systems

This paper proposes a novel adaptive feedforward control method for rejecting unknown disturbances acting on linear systems with uncertain dynamics. The proposed algorithm does not require a model of the plant dynamics and does not use batches of measurements in the adaptation process. Moreover, it is applicable to both minimum and non-minimum phase plants. The algorithm is a “direct” adaptive method, in the sense that the identification of system parameters and the control design are performed simultaneously. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, an adaptive feedforward controller is designed as an add-on compensator to the existing baseline controller of a hard disk drive. An accelerometer mounted on the disk drive casing provides the input signal for the controller. The control objective is to minimize the standard deviation of the position error signal in the presence of external random vibrations. Simulation results show that reduction of 46% in the standard deviation of the position error signal can be obtained.