Intermittent cancellation control: a control paradigm inspired by mammalian blood pressure control

Brown, Gonye and Schwaber (1998) presented a modified PI controller that attempted to improve performance of the closed loop system by only applying the integral action intermittently. This enabled the control actions to be tuned more aggressively, thus improving the disturbance rejection capabilities of the controller. This approach has now been generalized to handle other predictable disturbances, called the intermittent control. The controller begins as a traditional feedback controller designed to cancel random disturbances. Additional filters operate in parallel with this feedback controller and attempt to detect predictable disturbances. When these predictable disturbances are identified, an additional feedback loop is invoked. This additional parallel feedback loop is designed to specifically cancel the identified disturbance. When the disturbance appears to be cancelled, the feedback loop is opened creating an open-loop controller.