1

L1 Adaptive Control
Naira Hovakimyan
Professor, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA
e-mail: nhovakim@illinois.edu

The objective of this document is to provide a technical response to a widely circulated article [1], co-authored
by P. Ioannou, K. Narendra, A. Annaswamy, S. Jafari, L. Rudd, R. Ortega, and J. Boskovic, in which the authors
“have come together” to express “with one voice” their “growing concern” about the claims on performance and
robustness guarantees of L1 adaptive control. The article has been submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic
Control, and was also sent to funding agencies, government, industry, as well as academic communities. I was
invited to provide a technical review for the article by IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, which I formally
declined because of two reasons. First, the document violates the objective standards for scholarly publications, and
it seems to be written in an ill-spirited tone. Second, it is so wrong that it is clear that the authors did not put any
effort to follow up on our work and rushed to create a document that shows complete lack of understanding of the
main claims of the theory. Instead of providing a formal review, I composed this document to state –once more–
the main properties of L1 adaptive control and present the technical mistakes of [1] for the community at large.
The first paper on L1 adaptive control was submitted to IEEE CDC in 2005, which was declined. It later appeared
in ACC 2006 as a two-part paper, [2], [3]. It was later followed by a series of articles, culminating in the book, [4]. The
development of L1 adaptive control was motivated by some of the apparent issues that model reference adaptive
control (MRAC) has been facing for a number of years, [5]. Although every attempt has been made from our end to
explain the novelty and the contribution of L1 adaptive control over the years in various papers and presentations,
including [4], [6], [7], it seems that some of its benefits have not been well understood by several members of our
community.
The key difference between MRAC and L1 adaptive control is in the problem formulation, which consequently
leads to significant architectural differences. The wrong conception in [1] is that L1 adaptive control is perceived
like an input filtered MRAC, which is not the case. While the L1 adaptive control architectures do have a filtering
structure, there are two key points to be kept in mind: i ) this filtering structure stands in a very particular point of
the control architecture, ensuring that the estimation loop is decoupled from the control loop; and ii ) the synthesis
of this filtering structure depends on the class of systems considered and, in general, does not correspond to the
mere insertion of a low-pass filter. These two points have to be carefully addressed with every particular system,
dependent upon the presence of unmodeled dynamics, disturbances, noise, etc.
To make this exposition clear, this document includes three main parts: i ) a description of the problem formulation,
key ideas, and main properties of L1 adaptive control; ii ) a brief overview of the current challenges of the theory;
and iii ) a discussion of the claims in [1], which –as it will become evident– are unsubstantiated and, for the most
part, plainly wrong. In particular, we note that Section II-C analyzes in detail the simulation example from [1] with
a correct implementation of an L1 adaptive controller.

I. Problem Formulation
The essential difference between MRAC and L1 adaptive control is the problem formulation. To articulate this
difference, let’s look into the following class of systems:
ẋ (t) = Am x (t) + b(u(t) − θ ⊤ (t) x (t)) , x (0) = x0 ,
⊤
(1)
y(t) = c x (t) ,
where θ (t) is the vector of unknown parameters, confined to some a priori known compact set; Am is a Hurwitz
matrix specifying the desired closed-loop performance; b, c are known vectors; while x, u, and y are the state, the
input, and the output of the system (of appropriate dimensions). For the clarity of exposition, let’s restrict this
consideration to single-input single-output systems.
 2

A. Problem formulation in MRAC

The conventional problem formulation in MRAC is given as follows:
Determine a state feedback control law u(t) such that y(t) tracks a reference input r (t) asymptotically according
to the specifications of a given desired system:
ẋm (t) = Am xm (t) + bm r (t) , x m (0) = x0
⊤
(2)
ym (t) = c xm (t) ,
where bm = bk g , and k g ∈ R is selected to ensure a unity DC gain of this desired system.
This problem formulation leads to the definition of the nominal (non-implementable) controller:
MRAC
unom (t) = θ ⊤ (t) x (t) + k g r(t) , (3)
the substitution of which into (1) immediately yields (2). The MRAC solution seeks to determine estimation laws
for θ (t), which can be substituted into the nominal controller to yield its adaptive counterpart:
u MRAC (t) = θ̂ ⊤ (t) x (t) + k g r (t) . (4)
The determination of θ̂ (t) follows from Lyapunov analysis, which also implies that for constant θ and constant r one
has asymptotic convergence y(t) → r, [8]. The estimation rate of θ̂ (t) is referred to as adaptive gain in the literature.

B. Problem formulation in L1 adaptive control

The conventional problem formulation in L1 adaptive control theory is given as follows:
Determine a state feedback control law u(t) such that y(t) tracks the reference input r (t) and ensures:
• a priori predictable performance for all t ≥ 0 for different initial conditions and reference signals;
• the control signal u(t) does not exceed the available bandwidth of the control channel.
Notice that the first bullet of the problem formulation in L1 adaptive control asks for specifications from the
beginning of the system operation by enforcing for all t ≥ 0, while in MRAC the objective is stated only asymptotically.
A more important point is the second bullet regarding the bandwidth of the control signal. This second bullet
incorporates the robustness specifications for the control system explicitly in the problem formulation of L1 adaptive
control. To understand this requirement let’s first look at what can be achieved in the presence of known θ (t) by
the nominal controller (3) of MRAC. This controller aims at perfect cancelation of uncertainties; to see this, we note
that mathematical substitution of (3) into (1) leads to the desired dynamics (2). In a real application, the unknown
parameter vector θ (t) may have frequencies that lie outside the control channel bandwidth. In this case, these
frequencies will be naturally attenuated by the actuator of the system, which implies that –even in the presence of
perfect knowledge of θ (t)– the behavior of (2) may not be achievable for any t ≥ 0.
Based on the understanding that some classes of uncertainties may not be perfectly canceled even if they are
completely known, the problem formulation in L1 adaptive control is changed; the new problem formulation in
L1 adaptive control asks for compensation of uncertainties only within the bandwidth of the control channel,
specified by some bandwidth-limited filter C (s); namely, we formulate the nominal controller in L1 adaptive
control theory by resorting to the following structure:1
L
1
unom MRAC
(t) = C (s)[unom ](t) = C (s)[θ ⊤ x + k g r ](t) , (5)
where we use the time-domain notation y(t) = G (s)[u](t) to represent the system y(s) = G (s)u(s). We note that,
given a known θ (t), the filter C (s) can be designed so that the signal in (5) always stays within the control channel
bandwidth, irrespective of the frequency content of θ (t). Obviously, C (s) will attenuate the frequency components
in θ (t) that are above its bandwidth. This definition of nominal controller leads to a different –modified– reference
system (L1 reference system):
ẋref (t) = Am xref (t) + b(C (s)[θ ⊤ xref + k g r ](t) − θ ⊤ (t) xref (t)) , xref (0) = x0 ,
⊤
(6)
yref (t) = c xref (t) ,
1 The reference input can be left outside the filter.
 3

which is achievable from t = 0. The stability of this reference system can be analyzed by resorting to the L1 -norm
condition
k(1 − C (s))(sI − Am )−1 bkL1 θmax < 1 ,
where θmax refers to the maximum value of the L1 norm of θ (t).2
Given the nominal controller in (5), its corresponding L1 -adaptive counterpart is defined as follows:3
uL1 (t) = C (s)[θ̂ ⊤ x + k g r ](t) . (7)
For derivation of the adaptive laws, along with the proofs of stability and performance, one can refer to [4, pp. 18–
27].
Remark 1: The key point in the above discussion is that the L1 problem formulation prioritizes the feasibility
of the control objective with the understanding of the hardware constraints (control channel bandwidth), [9]4 . The
MRAC formulation, on the other hand, attempts to compensate for all uncertainties, irrespective of their frequency
content.

II. Key Ideas and Assumptions: Role of Architectures

A. Key Idea: Decoupling
The treatment above illustrates the difference in the problem formulations of MRAC and L1 adaptive control.
The key, however, is how to synthesize an architecture for this new problem formulation that decouples the
estimation loop from the control loop. As it will become clear, this decoupling is the critical feature that allows us
to increase the adaptive gain in the adaptation laws without hurting the robustness margins (time-delay margin)
of the closed-loop adaptive system. It is evident that “the mere introduction of a filter” (as described in [1]) –in
series with the adaptive controller– will not achieve this decoupling and will only hurt the robustness properties
(time-delay margin) of the closed-loop system. In this section, we describe the basic architecture of L1 adaptive
controllers and emphasize the importance of inserting the bandwidth-limited filter C (s) in a very particular point
of the architecture.
For this purpose, we consider two adaptive control schemes: a predictor-based MRAC and the corresponding
L1 adaptive controller; see Figure 1. Both architectures use a state predictor, which mimics the structure of the system
from (1), with the only difference that the unknown parameters are replaced by their corresponding estimates:
x̂˙ (t) = Am x̂ (t) + b(u(t) − θ̂ ⊤ (t) x (t)) , x (0) = x0 ,
⊤
(8)
ŷ(t) = c x̂ (t) .
It is important to emphasize that a perfect initialization of the predictor, using x0 , is impossible in practice. The non-
zero initialization errors are proven to lead to additional exponentially decaying terms in the overall performance
bounds, [4]. For brevity, we do not elaborate on these details here. The error signal x̃ (t) = x̂(t) − x (t) is used for
synthesis of the adaptive law (estimation of θ̂ (t)). Notice that the dynamics of x̃ (t) are independent of the control
law and are the same for both MRAC and L1 adaptive control laws:
x̃˙ (t) = Am x̃ (t) − b(θ̂ (t) − θ (t))⊤ x (t) , x (0) = 0,
⊤
(9)
ỹ(t) = c x̃ (t) .
Finally, notice that the closed-loop predictor with the MRAC control law from (4) results in the desired dynamics,
given by (2).
It is important to notice from Figure 1b that, in L1 control architectures, the filtered control signal is sent to both
the plant and the state predictor; the filter is thus embedded into the adaptive architecture, which implies that one
cannot analyze the closed-loop system as if the adaptive controller and the filter were acting in series. The fact
that both the predictor and the plant are using the same filtered control signal is crucial to ensure the decoupling of
the estimation and control loops. In other words, the presence of the filter at this particular point of the architecture
2 We notice that the stability of this reference system can be proved using any other norm. However, for the purpose of discussing the transient

behavior of the resulting closed-loop system in terms of control specifications, we need to use the L ∞ norms of signals; hence, since the L1 norm
of a system is the induced L ∞ norm of its input/output signals, we use the L1 norm in order to facilitate the transient analysis.
3
The reference input can be left outside the filter.
4 “. . . Note that the available bandwidth is not a function of the compensator or of the control design process. Rather, it is an a priori constraint

imposed by the physical hardware we use in the control loop. Most importantly, the available bandwidth is always finite”, [9].
 4

is what allows us to increase the adaptive gain without hurting the robustness margins (time-delay margin) of the
closed-loop adaptive system. The same filter inserted at a different point (output of the adaptation laws, input of
the state predictor only, input of the plant only...) will not achieve the decoupling of the two loops.
To give more insights into this point, we consider the MRAC architecture in Figure 1a and note that the parameter
estimate generated by the estimation loop of MRAC propagates through the control law directly into the plant.
Thus, in MRAC architectures, the adaptive gain acts as a feedback gain. Therefore, the speed of adaptation, defined
by the adaptation gain (estimation rate), plays a crucial role in the robustness and performance tradeoff in MRAC.
Instead, in L1 adaptive control architectures, the adaptive gain does not act as a feedback gain, which implies
that –from an architectural perspective– one can increase the adaptive gain without reducing the robustness margins
(time-delay margin) of the closed-loop system. This result is proven in [10]. In short, in L1 adaptive controllers, the
architecture does not limit the choice of the adaptive gains, whereas in MRAC it does, because high adaptive gains
lead to high-gain feedback.
Moreover, we note that the fast estimation loop in L1 architectures (see Figure 1b) is implemented as a unique
block in a processor/computer. The only uncertainties encountered internally are computational and communication
delays, cycle time, quantization, etc., and are solely due to the numerical implementation of the controller. It is clear
that these ‘cyber’ uncertainties will put constraints on the choice of the adaptive gain in L1 control architectures
to ensure that the fast estimation loop is numerically stable.
The analysis above illustrates how, for the class of systems in (1) with known input gain, a simple filtering
structure –inserted at the right point within the architecture– decouples the estimation loop from the control loop,
which in its turn allows to increase the adaptive gain arbitrarily, subject only to hardware limitations.

B. Assumptions and Extension to Systems with Unknown Input Gain

The next natural question is how far one can move with this approach. In fact, to be honest, the greatest challenge
in our past eight years’ history was to extend this solution to systems with unknown input gain, subject to the
assumption of known sign commonly adopted in the literature, [11]. The reason that I emphasize this point is
that, quite often, L1 adaptive control is viewed by the critics as an input filtered MRAC, as the authors of [1] have
attempted to present and interpret without understanding the significance of decoupling.
In general, L1 adaptive control should not be perceived just as a result of inserting a bandwidth-limited filter
into an MRAC architecture, but rather as a methodology for the synthesis of a filtering structure that decouples
the estimation loop from the control loop, with analytically provable guarantees. Let’s see, for example, why the
control law in (7) (presented in Figure 1b) does not work in the presence of unknown input gain.
Consider the dynamics of the same system as in (1) but with unknown input gain ω:
ẋ (t) = Am x (t) + b(ωu(t) + θ ⊤ (t) x (t)) , x (0) = x0 , (10)
where the sign of ω as well as upper and lower bounds on ω are known.
In a predictor-based MRAC scheme, presented in Figure 1a, we estimate the plant parameters θ̂ (t) and ω̂ (t) using
the following state predictor:

x̂˙ (t) = Am x̂ (t) + b ω̂ (t)u(t) + θ̂ ⊤ (t) x (t) ,

 
x̂(0) = x0 , (11)

which mimics the structure of the plant (10). Using the same certainty equivalence principle that we used to derive (4),
the MRAC control law is given by:
1  ⊤ 
u( t) = −θ̂ (t) x (t) + k g r (t) . (12)
ω̂ (t)
Substituting (12) into (11), we obtain the desired system (2). Notice that this definition of the control law requires
the adaptation law to ensure that the estimate ω̂ (t) remains bounded away from zero. For this purpose one can
use projection-based adaptation laws [12].
In this case, however, the L1 adaptive control law cannot be defined just as the filtered version of the MRAC
control law similar to what we did in the previous section. To show where the problem lies, consider the filtered
version of the control signal in (12), similar to (7):
u f ( s) = C f ( s) u( s) , (13)
 5

σ ν n
u x
Plant

r x̂
Control Law State Predictor

θ x̃
Adaptation Law

Estimation Loop
Controller (CPU)
(a) MRAC

σ ν n
u x
Filter Plant

r x̂
Control Law State Predictor

θ x̃
Adaptation Law

Fast Estimation Loop

Controller (CPU)
(b) L1 adaptive controller

Fig. 1: Adaptive control architectures. The state predictor mimics the system structure with the unknown parameters
replaced by the parameter estimates. The parameter estimates generated by the estimation loop of MRAC propagate
through the control law directly into the plant. In the presence of fast estimation rates, the control signal may exceed
the available control system bandwidth, which can hurt the robustness of the closed-loop adaptive system. Therefore,
the speed of adaptation, defined by the estimation rate, plays a crucial role in the robustness and performance
tradeoff for MRAC schemes. In L1 adaptive controllers, the estimation loop is decoupled from the control loop; the filter
protects the control signal from exceeding the available control system bandwidth, as it shields the high-frequency
content of the parameter estimates, due to the large rates, inside the controller block. The fast estimation loop of
L1 adaptive controller is implemented completely in an uncertainty-free environment and, therefore, it allows fast
estimation rates without hurting robustness. We also notice that the loop breaking points used in conventional
robust control cannot be affected by the large gains of the fast estimation loop of L1 adaptive controller.

where u(s) is the Laplace transform of u(t) in (12), and C f (s) is a low-pass filter. Let c f (t) be the impulse response
of the transfer function C f (s). Then
!
k g r (t) − θ̂ ⊤ (t) x (t)
u f ( t) = c f ( t) ∗ u( t) = c f ( t) ∗ ,
ω̂ (t)

where ∗ denotes the convolution operator5 . Substituting this expression into the system dynamics (10), we get
!! !
k g r (t) − θ̂ ⊤ (t) x (t) ⊤
ẋ (t) = Am x (t) + b ω c f (t) ∗ + θ̂ (t) x (t) , x (0) = x0 , (14)
ω̂ (t)
while substituting its ideal (non-adaptive) version into the corresponding L1 reference system (following the same
5 The
Rt
convolution operator c( t) = a( t)∗b ( t) for signals a( t), b ( t), c( t) ∈ R for t ≥ 0 is defined as c( t) = 0 a( t − τ ) b ( τ ) dτ.
 6

philosophy as the derivation of (6)) leads to

k g r − θ ⊤ xref
" # !
⊤
ẋref (t) = Am xref (t) + b ω C f ( s) (t) + θ (t) xref (t) , xref (0) = x0 . (15)
ω

In (15) ω1 can be moved in front of C f (s) to cancel ω; however, the convolution operator does not allow moving ω̂1( t)
outside the convolution operator in (14) to write ω̂ω( t) . This fact renders the derivation of the performance bounds
between x (t) and xref (t) (and also u(t) and uref (t)) overly complicated, resulting in a cumbersome and inelegant
proof (to say the least). As a consequence, predictability of the control law (13) is questionable.
The L1 adaptive controller for this system is defined using the following filtering structure (see Figure 2):
k
u( s) = η̂ (s) , (16)
s
where η̂ (s) is the Laplace transform of
η̂ (t) = k g r (t) − θ̂ ⊤ (t) x (t) − ω̂ (t)u(t) .
The control law in (16) can thus be expressed as:
!
k g r (t) − θ̂ ⊤ (t) x (t)
u̇(t) = −kω̂ (t)u(t) + kω̂ (t) , u(0) = 0 , (17)
ω̂ (t)
and, therefore, ω̂ (t) can be viewed as a time-varying gain affecting the ‘bandwidth’ of a first-order linear time-
varying filter. This approach (even if it might not seem trivial from this description) allows to derive a rather simple
proof of the performance bounds of this adaptive architecture. For details, see [4]. If we consider the case of slowly
varying reference signals, equation (17) gives us further insights into this control law. In steady state, when u̇(t) ≈ 0,
we have that
k g r (t) − θ̂ ⊤ (t) x (t) − ω̂ (t)u(t) ≈ 0 .
Comparing the control law in (16) to the indirect MRAC control law (12), we find that the L1 control law avoids
division by ω̂ (t). The filter in the L1 control law (16) solves the design equation dynamically by driving η̂ (t) to
zero.6
Remark 2: Notice that in the definition of the filtered control law (16), in general, one can use an arbitrary
strictly-proper transfer function D (s), which leads to a higher-order, strictly-proper, stable filter with extra design
parameters:
kωD (s)
C ( s) = . (18)
1 + kωD (s)
Also, if D (s) includes an integrator, then C (s) has a unity DC gain, i.e. C (0) = 1, [4]. In this case, the control law
in (16) takes the following form [4]:
u(s) = kD (s)η̂ (s) . (19)

C. Simulation Example
To illustrate the decoupling of the estimation loop from the control loop for the filtering structure presented
above, we refer to the simulation example from [1]. Simulation files are available upon request.
1) L1 Adaptive Controller for the Nominal System: Consider the following scalar system, [1]:
ẋ (t) = − x (t) + ωu(t) , x (0) = x0 , (20)
where ω is an unknown parameter with known sign and lower and upper bounds. The L1 adaptive controller for
this system consists of the state predictor
x̂˙ (t) = − x̂ (t) + ω̂ (t)u(t) , x̂ (0) = x0 ,
where the estimate ω̂ (t) is governed by the following adaptation law:
ω̂˙ (t) = Γ Proj(ω̂ (t), − x̃(t)u(t)) , ω̂ (0) = ω̂0 ,
6 This insight was shared with us by Karl J. Åström.
 7

σ ν

η̂ u
k
s ẋ = Am x + b(ωu + θ ⊤ x )

Plant n
r η̂ = k g r − θ̂ ⊤ x − ω̂u

Control law

x̂
x̂˙ = Am x̂ + b(ω̂u + θ̂ ⊤ x )
State predictor

θ̂, ω̂ θ̂˙ = Γ Proj(θ̂, − x̃ ⊤ Pbx ) x̃

ω̂˙ = Γ Proj(ω̂, − x̃ ⊤ Pbu)
Adaptation laws

Controller (CPU)

Fig. 2: L1 adaptive control architecture for systems with unknown input gain. The estimation loop is embedded
inside the controller and is fully decoupled from the system uncertainties. The filtering structure for synthesizing
the feedback law is shielding the high frequencies due to fast estimation rates from propagating into the system.

and the control signal is generated as

u(s) = kD (s)η̂ (s) ,
η̂ (t) = r (t) − ω̂ (t)u(t) .
Simulation results are shown in Figure 3 for ω = 1 (as in [1]), x0 = 0, and ω̂0 = 0.5. For the design of the
1
L1 adaptive controller we choose k = 5 and D (s) = s(0.05s +1 )
. The adaptation gain is set to Γ = 500, 000, and the
projection bounds are set to ω̂ (t) ∈ [0.1, 2∆], θ̂ (t) ∈ [−∆, ∆], σ̂ (t) ∈ [−∆, ∆], with ∆ = 106 . As can be observed in
Figure 3, the system output tracks the reference command (with zero steady-state error) according to the desired
specifications. The control signal is smooth and does not have any spikes or oscillations, despite the high frequencies
in the estimated parameters due to the large estimation gain (fast adaptation).
2) L1 Adaptive Controller in the Presence of Unmodeled Dynamics: Next, we check robustness of this L1 adaptive
controller for the unmodeled input dynamics suggested in [1]. For this purpose, we rewrite (20) as follows:
ẋ(t) = − x (t) + ωµ(t) , x (0) = x0 ,
where µ(s) = (1 − 0.02s)u(t) is the output of the unmodeled dynamics at the system’s input. We use the same
L1 adaptive controller as above, and do not do any redesign or retuning. The simulation results in Figure 4 show
that in the presence of the unmodeled dynamics the system performance is very close to the original performance
without the unmodeled dynamics, given in Figure 3. We also observe that, after the initial transient, the parameter
estimate remains in the neighborhood of the actual value of the system input gain and does not hit the projection
bounds. The fact that the unmodeled dynamics only lead to a minor degradation of performance and do not
destabilize the system clearly shows that the large adaptive gain does not lead to high-gain feedback control, implying
in its turn that the filtering structure of L1 adaptive control effectively decouples the estimation loop from the control
loop.
3) L1 Adaptive Controller with Three Adaptive Parameters: We notice that, while the L1 adaptive controller shown
above is suitable for the system in (20) and exhibits good robustness properties, it may not be practical if the
system has additional uncertainties besides the input unmodeled dynamics proposed by the authors of [1]. Next
we present a more general L1 adaptive control structure from [4, Section 2.3], which adapts for three types of
 8

1 1.2

1
0.8
r(t), x(t), xm (t)

0.8
0.6

u(t)
0.6
0.4
0.4
r(t)
0.2 0.2
x(t)
xm (t)
0 0
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
time [s] time [s]

(a) System state (b) Control history

−3
x 10
1 1.5

0.5 1

ω̂(t)
x̃(t)

0 0.5

−0.5 0

−1 −0.5
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
time [s] time [s]

(c) Prediction error (d) Parameter estimates

Fig. 3: Simulation results for the L1 adaptive controller without unmodeled dynamics. The closed-loop system
output tracks the reference command according to the desired specifications. The control signal is smooth and does
not have any spikes or oscillations. The parameter estimate experiences high-frequency oscillations, which do not
propagate into the control signal because of the decoupling estimation and control loops in the L1 adaptive control
architecture.

parametric uncertainties. It consists of the following state predictor:

x̂˙ (t) = − x̂ (t) + ω̂ (t)u(t) + θ̂ (t) x (t) + σ̂(t) , x̂(0) = x0 , (21)
where the parameter estimates are generated using the following projection-based adaptation laws:
ω̂˙ (t) = Γ Proj(ω̂ (t), − x̃(t)u(t)) , ω̂ (0) = ω̂0 , (22)
θ̂˙ (t) = Γ Proj(θ̂ (t), − x̃(t) x (t)) , θ̂ (0) = θ̂0 , (23)
σ̂˙ (t) = Γ Proj(σ̂(t), − x̃(t)) , σ̂(0) = σ̂0 , (24)
and the L1 adaptive control signal is generated as
u(s) = kD (s)η̂ (s) ,
η̂ (t) = r (t) − σ̂(t) − θ̂ (t) x (t) − ω̂ (t)u(t) .
Simulation results for the system in the presence of unmodeled input dynamics are shown in Figure 5, where
we use ω = 1, x0 = 0, ω̂0 = 0.5, θ̂0 = σ̂0 = 0. For the design of the L1 adaptive controller, we use the same control
parameters as in the previous scenario. We see that the control system achieves tracking of the step reference
command (with zero steady-state error) according to the desired specifications. The control signal is smooth and
does not experience oscillations. The prediction error is relatively small for all time t ≥ 0, and the parameter
estimates remain bounded without hitting the projection bounds.
 9

1 1.2

1
0.8
r(t), x(t), xm (t)

0.8
0.6

u(t)
0.6
0.4
0.4
r(t)
0.2 0.2
x(t)
xm (t)
0 0
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
time [s] time [s]

(a) System state (b) Control history

−3
x 10
1 1.5

0.5 1

ω̂(t)
x̃(t)

0 0.5

−0.5 0

−1 −0.5
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
time [s] time [s]

(c) Prediction error (d) Parameter estimates

Fig. 4: Simulation results for the L1 adaptive controller in the presence of unmodeled input dynamics. Both the
system output and the control signal remain close to the signals obtained in the absence of the unmodeled dynamics
in Figure 3. The parameter estimate remains in the neighborhood of the actual value and does not hit the projection
bound.

4) Comparison of the Time-delay Margins of L1 Adaptive Controller and MRAC: Finally, we test the robustness of the
L1 adaptive controller to time delays and compare it to the corresponding MRAC architecture. For this purpose, we
consider the system (20) and the L1 adaptive controller with three parameter estimates. We use the same control
parameters as above for the design of the L1 adaptive controller.
For the design of MRAC we use the same state predictor and adaptation laws as in (21)–(24). The control law of
MRAC is given by
1
r (t) − θ̂ (t) x (t) − σ̂(t) .


u( t) =
ω̂ (t)
Next we compute numerically the time-delay margin for both controllers as a function of the adaptation gain.
The results in Figure 6 show that the time-delay margin of MRAC vanishes as the adaptation gain is increased,
while the time-delay margin of L1 adaptive controller remains bounded away from zero. For large adaptation gains
it approaches the value T = 0.28 s.
Next we show the transient behavior of the L1 adaptive controller in the presence of time delays. For this purpose,
we consider a time delay at the system input of τ = 0.1 s (comparable to the time-delay margin of the system).
The simulation results are given in Figure 7. As we see, the transient response of the closed-loop system with the
L1 adaptive controller is very close to the response without time-delay shown in Figure 5.
5) Scaled Transient Response of L1 Adaptive Controller: Next, we compare the transient responses of L1 adaptive
controller to MRAC. For this purpose, we use the same MRAC as above and set its adaptation gain to Γ MRAC = 0.9,
which results in the same time-delay margin as it is achieved by the L1 adaptive controller in the presence of fast
adaptation. The simulation results for 3 step commands of different amplitude in the presence of unmodeled
 10

1 1.2

1
0.8
r(t), x(t), xm (t)

0.8
0.6

u(t)
0.6
0.4
0.4
r(t)
0.2 0.2
x(t)
xm (t)
0 0
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
time [s] time [s]

(a) System state (b) Control history

−5
x 10
2 1.5
ω̂(t)
θ̂(t)
1 σ̂(t)
1

ω̂(t), θ̂(t), σ̂(t)

0
x̃(t)

0.5
−1

0
−2

−3 −0.5
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
time [s] time [s]

(c) Prediction error (d) Parameter estimates

Fig. 5: Simulation results for the L1 adaptive controller with projection based adaptation laws. The system state
achieves tracking of the step reference command according to the desired specifications in the presence of unmodeled
input dynamics. The control signal is smooth and does not experience oscillations.

1 1
4
0.4
Time-delay Margin (s)

Time-delay Margin (s)

0.8 0.8
2 0.2
0.6 0.6
0 0
0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000
0.4 0.4

0.2 0.2

0 0
0 10 20 30 40 0 10 20 30 40
Adaptation Gain Γ Adaptation Gain Γ

(a) L1 adaptive controller (b) MRAC

Fig. 6: Time-delay margin of L1 adaptive controller and MRAC as a function of adaptation gain. The time-delay
margin of MRAC vanishes as the adaptation gain is increased, while the time-delay margin of L1 adaptive controller
remain bounded away from zero as the adaptation gain increases. For large adaptation gains it approaches the value
T = 0.28 s.
 11

1 1.2

1
0.8
r(t), x(t), xm (t)

0.8
0.6

u(t)
0.6
0.4
0.4
r(t)
0.2 0.2
x(t)
xm (t)
0 0
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
time [s] time [s]

(a) System state (b) Control history

−5
x 10
5 1.5
ω̂(t)
θ̂(t)
1 σ̂(t)
x̃(t)

ω̂(t)
0 0.5

−5 −0.5
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
time [s] time [s]

(c) Prediction error (d) Parameter estimates

Fig. 7: Simulation results for the L1 adaptive controller in the presence of time delay τ = 0.1 s (the time delay
margin of the control system is approximately 0.28 s). The system input and output performance are very close to
the results shown in Figure 5.

input dynamics are given in Figure 8. We see that the state response of the L1 adaptive controller scales with the
amplitude of the step command (similar to linear systems), whereas the transient response of MRAC changes in
an unpredictable manner.
Remark 3: With regards to authors’ claim in [1] regarding the roles of the projection operator and the filter in the
stability and performance of L1 adaptive controller, we would like to mention that in L1 adaptive control design and
analysis both are equally important. In particular, the above example demonstrates that with the projection operator
inactive (by selecting sufficiently large projection bounds), the system is robust to the unmodeled dynamics.

D. L1 Adaptive Architectures for Various Classes of Systems in State Feedback and Output Feedback
A natural question arises as how to synthesize the filtering structure for various classes of systems, including
strict-feedback systems with nonlinearities, systems with unmodeled dynamics, unmatched uncertainties, using
state feedback and output feedback. For example, how to handle non-SPR systems in an output feedback setting?
A systematic way for developing all these architectures and the corresponding filtering structures, including special
adaptive laws for non-SPR systems with output feedback, can be found in [4].
Remark 4: Notice that there is no universal L1 adaptive controller that would fit all the systems, as there is no
universal MRAC controller that would fit all the systems. Synthesizing a correct filtering structure that decouples the
estimation loop from the control loop is the critical element to understand the development of the L1 adaptive control
theory. As an example, we refer to [13], where the author naively extended the input filtering from Section I,
according to Figure 1b, to Monopoli’s architecture from [14] to conclude that the L1 adaptive controller cannot
achieve perfect tracking in the presence of bounded disturbances. In response, we published [15], where we showed
 12

r(t) r(t)
3 3
x(t) x(t)
2.5 2.5
r(t), x(t), xm (t)

r(t), x(t), xm (t)

2 2

1.5 1.5

1 1

0.5 0.5

0 0
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
time [s] time [s]

(a) L1 Controller system state (b) MRAC system state

6 6
u(t) for r = 0.5 u(t) for r = 0.5
u(t) for r = 1.5 u(t) for r = 1.5
5 5
u(t) for r = 3 u(t) for r = 3
4 4
u(t)

u(t)
3 3

2 2

1 1

0 0
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
time [s] time [s]

(c) L1 Controller control signal (d) MRAC control signal

Fig. 8: Comparison of transient responses of L1 adaptive controller and MRAC in the presence of unmodeled
dynamics. The state response of the L1 adaptive controller scales with the magnitude of the step command, whereas
the transient response of MRAC is highly nonlinear and changes in an unpredictable manner.

how to synthesize the filtering structure and the corresponding L1 architecture, appropriate for that particular
Monopoli-style MRAC scheme, to achieve perfect decoupling between the estimation and the control loops.

III. L1 Adaptive Control Design Challenges

As explained in the preceding sections of this document, the main challenge in synthesizing an L1 controller for a
given plant is to understand how to build the filtering structure so that the estimation loop and the control loop are
decoupled. Another open problem is how to choose the parameters of the filtering structure so that the sufficient
conditions of stability are verified and a given performance index is optimized; in particular, this design problem
is extremely challenging in output feedback architectures. Some partial solutions for addressing these problems are
summarized in [16]–[18].

IV. Wrong Claims in “L1 -adaptive control: Stability, robustness, and misperceptions” [1]
In the light of the above discussion, this section rebuts claims and statements in [1]. We analyze the claims as
they appear in [1], indicating the section in which a particular claim was made.
Abstract:
• The claim “. . . arbitrarily fast convergence to desired values . . . ” needs clarification. It appears that the authors
of [1] have misinterpreted our results in stating “arbitrarily fast convergence to desired values” as one of
the properties of our controllers. Their statement suggests parameter convergence, which we never claimed.
Instead, in all of our work, we have analyzed the transient and steady-state responses of the input and output
signals of the closed-loop adaptive system, and have derived bounds on the maximum deviation of these
signals from the corresponding desired response. To be more specific, our claims refer to uniform performance
 13

bounds for both the input and the state of the closed-loop system with respect to the corresponding signals
of the L1 reference system, introduced earlier in this document. This L1 reference system assumes partial
compensation of uncertainties within the bandwidth of filter C (s), and hence does not exhibit the ideal
performance. This reference system in its turn can approximate the response of the desired (ideal) system
by appropriate tuning of the filter, which characterizes the tradeoff between performance and robustness. As
explained in detail in [4], the role of this auxiliary L1 reference system is to decouple the analysis between the
estimation process and the performance/robustness properties of the closed-loop system.
Section I. Introduction:
• “Reference [3] was the first instance of an L1 -formulation presented in the literature (see [3], Section 9.4) even though no
name was given to the modified scheme”. We note that Section 9.4 of reference [3] in [1] has, in fact, a formulation
that uses the L1 norm in its analysis; however, the control architecture presented in that section does not have
any resemblance to the architectures of the L1 adaptive control theory. For example, the architecture that the
authors present in Section 9.4.1 in‘ [1] is a combination of a conventional adaptive control scheme with a non-
adaptive model-reference PI controller, in which 1/τ acts as both the proportional and the integral gains. The
authors argue that tracking performance can be improved “by choosing an arbitrarily small τ”. However, the
authors fail to mention that, as one reduces the control parameter τ, the non-adaptive PI controller becomes
a high-gain feedback control scheme that dominates the adaptive counterpart. Reducing τ results thus in
improved performance at the price, however, of reduced robustness margins. The same discussion applies to
the controller proposed in Section 9.4.2 in [1], which is just a generalization of the one in Section 9.4.1.
• “According to the authors of L1-AC, this is accomplished by the mere introduction of an input filter and boosting the
adaptive gain of the estimated parameters to very large values”. This statement is not precise at all. As explained
in Section II of this document, the key in the design of L1 adaptive controllers is the combination of a state
predictor, a filtering structure (inserted at a very precise point of the control architecture), and the structure
of the estimation laws with appropriate bounding features.
• The claims 1) through 4) on page 3 of [1] are not correct. These four points will be discussed below.

Section II. What is L1 -AC?:

Section II falls short of making complete claims and only presents the most basic L1 adaptive controller for the
most simple class of systems. In particular,
• Regarding 1), one must add that the difference between L1 and MRAC, represented by the addition of the
filter C (s), is true only for this simple class of systems. As explained earlier in this document, for other classes
of systems, the filtering structure of L1 adaptive controllers may take a different form, making these controllers
significantly different from the existing MRAC architectures.
• Regarding 2), the global stability results obtained with MRAC can also be claimed for L1 adaptive control.
• Regarding 3), the authors fail to mention that, in addition to the bound on the state tracking error, L1 adaptive
control architectures have a similar bound on the adaptive control signal, whereas MRAC cannot claim this
second, very important, bound. In particular, the bound on the control signal is critical to analyze the robustness
properties of L1 adaptive controllers. The lack of this uniform bound on the control signal of MRAC leads
consequently to lack of robustness in the presence of fast adaptation.
Section III. L1 -AC: Stability:
• The first bullet on page 5 in [1] hides a subtle, but critical, difference between the two architectures that
the authors fail to mention. Large adaptive gains in MRAC architectures lead to high-gain feedback with
reduced robustness margins, which implies that robustness of MRAC architectures is lost as the adaptive gain
is increased; instead, in L1 adaptive control architectures, robustness is decoupled from the adaptive gain
(see [4], pp. 8–15 and 47–59). The authors again omit this important point.
• The authors also omit the important bound on the control signal, which MRAC does not have.
• A similar attitude is taken in the second bullet with respect to the bound in equation (10) of [1]. The authors fail
to mention that L1 adaptive control has a similar bound for the control signal, which is critically important for
robustness analysis. Moreover, notice that from equation (10) in [1] it follows that a non-zero initialization error
leads to exponentially decaying terms, which is another proof of guaranteed transient response. This result is
further articulated in the time-delay margin proof, which, unfortunately, the authors did not follow-up (see [4],
pp. 47–59).
 14

• The comment in the last bullet regarding the non-zero steady-state tracking error is not correct, as L1 adaptive
control, similar to MRAC, guarantees zero steady-state tracking error for constant reference inputs. Remark 2.1.2
in [4] has the proof of this result, which the authors omit. If the reference input is time-varying, then neither
MRAC nor L1 adaptive control will ensure asymptotic tracking of r (t). However, we notice that, for time-
varying reference inputs, L1 adaptive control may exhibit a larger lag due to the filter than the MRAC controller.
Therefore, the design of the filter in L1 adaptive control has to be done carefully with consideration of both
transient and steady-state specifications, along with the robustness requirements.

Section IV. L1 -AC: Robustness:

• For the system in equation (16) of [1], the L1 adaptive control is not given by equation (17) of [1]. This controller
proposed by the authors in [1] seems to be a conventional MRAC in series with a low-pass filter. As explained
in the earlier sections of this document, this is not an L1 adaptive controller. The correct L1 adaptive control
architecture for this system has been presented in Section II-C of this document. Hence, all the results and
claims made in Section IV.B of [1] are plainly wrong.

Section V. L1 -AC: Output Feedback:

• The authors argue that for the considered class of systems the L1 controller is a simple integral controller with
anti-windup protection. While for the first-order reference systems the structure of the L1 adaptive output-
feedback controller can be interpreted as filtered PI controller with anti-windup, we would like to note a couple
of points:
– First, if we look into the system dynamics in (1) and replace θ ⊤ (t) x (t) by θ (t), then the MRAC controller
will reduce to a model-following PI controller. Hence, it should not be surprising that in certain cases the
L1 adaptive controller can be also reduced to a simpler structure; and
– Second, there are important architectural differences between a conventional model-following filtered PI and
the corresponding L1 controller. As explained in the beginning of this document (Sections I and II), the
architectures of L1 adaptive control theory cannot be viewed as a filtered MRAC scheme, because the
filter is not cascaded with the MRAC control law. The authors of [1] should not underestimate the specific
location of the filtering structure in the architecture, and how it should be synthesized to effectively decouple
the estimation and the control loops so that the integral (adaptation) gain can be increased without leading
to high-gain feedback.
Moreover, we notice that, for more general classes of systems, the L1 adaptive controller remains nonlinear [15].
Hence, the case of L1 adaptive output-feedback architecture considered in [1] is not representative. Therefore,
the claims made by authors in Section V of [1] cannot be generalized to any other L1 adaptive output-feedback
control architecture.
• The authors refer to reference [27] in [1] to claim that “simulation studies of L1-AC to flight platforms . . . have
observed mediocre performance compared to other adaptive algorithms”. However, it is easy to verify that reference [27]
from [1] has a wrong implementation of L1 adaptive control. This issue was already discussed with the authors
of [27], and it is therefore surprising to see that this paper is being used in [1] as a ‘failure’ of an L1 adaptive
controller.
• Regarding the implementations in [25] and [26] of [1], we agree that the implemented L1 adaptive controllers
reduce to a linear time-varying structure. For the class of systems in [26], we were able to prove (with some
delay) that the common nonlinear gradient-minimization-based adaptive laws with projection can also be
applied with provable guarantees; this result was included in [4, Section 3.2]. As explained in Remark 3.3.2
of [4], the performance bounds for both adaptive laws appeared to be identical, and hence there is no benefit in
trying to implement also the gradient-minimization-based adaptive laws with the projection operator. There are,
however, several other implementations of L1 adaptive control laws where the commonly adopted gradient-
minimization-based nonlinear adaptive laws have been employed (see, for example, [19]–[21]).

Section VI. Conclusions:

• As clarified earlier in this same section, the control architectures from [3, Section 9.4] in [1], the analysis of
which employs the L1 norm, are different from the architectures of the L1 adaptive control theory in [4].
• Asymptotic tracking with zero steady-state error of step inputs is proved in Remark 2.1.2 of [4].
 15

• The presence of the filter embedded in the L1 adaptive control architecture protects the stability margins and
is not affecting adversely the robustness in the presence of large adaptive gain (it might be a good idea to
study the proof of Theorem 2.2.4 from [4]).
• We agree that parameter projection is a critical element in the proofs of L1 adaptive control theory; however, as
discussed in the first sections of this document, the presence of the bandwidth-limited filter at a very particular
point of the control architecture is what ensures the decoupling between the estimation and the control loops.
• The use of the large adaptive gains is important in the robustness of L1 adaptive control systems, as proven
in Theorem 2.2.4 of [4].
• As we clarified earlier, while for some classes of systems L1 adaptive controller reduces to a simpler structure,
this structure is not a filtered PI controller. Moreover, the authors have missed important references such as [15].

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