The control of underactuated Euler–Lagrange systems with uncertain and switched parameters is an important problem whose solution has many applications. The problem is challenging as standard adaptive control techniques do not extend to this class of systems due to structural constraints that lead to parameterization difficulties. This note proposes an adaptive switched control framework that handles the uncertainty and switched dynamics without imposing structural constraints. A case study inspired by autonomous vessel operations is used to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Current approaches to the cooperative control of network systems are based on a priori knowledge about the (follower) system dynamics: Either the dynamics are known, or assumed to be minimum phase, or initial stabilizing controllers are available for each system. The purpose of this article is to show that for single-input single-output systems (SISO) the above assumptions can be relaxed. We propose an indirect adaptive methodology that does not require the knowledge of the parameters of the systems, or the systems to be minimum phase, or initial stabilizing controllers, in order to guarantee asymptotic tracking.

An adaptive decentralized strategy for active queue management of TCP flows over communication networks is presented. The proposed strategy solves locally, at each link, an optimal control problem, minimizing a cost composed of residual capacity and buffer queue size. The solution of the optimal control problem exploits an adaptive optimization algorithm aiming at adaptively minimizing a suitable approximation of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation associated with the optimal control problem. Simulations results, obtained by using a fluid flow based model of the communication network and a common network topology, show improvement with respect to the Random Early Detection strategy. Besides, it is shown that the performance of the proposed decentralized solution is comparable with the performance obtained with a centralized strategy, which solves the optimal control problem via a central unit that maintains the flow states of the entire network.