Abstract
Hysteresis is a nonlinear characteristic ubiquitously exhibited by smart material sensors and actuators, such as piezoelectric actuators and shape memory alloys. The Prandtl–Ishlinskii (PI) operator is widely used to describe hysteresis of smart material systems due to its simple structure and the existence of analytical inverse. A PI operator consists of a weighted superposition of play (backlash) operators. While adaptive estimation of the weights for PI operators has been reported in the literature, rigorous analysis of parameter convergence is lacking. In this article, we establish persistent excitation and thus parameter convergence for adaptive weight estimation under a rather modest condition on the input to the PI operator. The analysis is further supported via simulation, where a recursive least square (RLS) method is adopted for parameter estimation.