Adaptive control of opto-electro-mechanical systems for broadband disturbance rejection

The research reported by this dissertation deals with two prominent engineering problems using minimum-variance adaptive controllers. In the first chapters of this dissertation, we are concerned with experiments on the control of microelectromechanical-systems (MEMS) mirrors for laser-beam jitter rejection. In the second part of this dissertation, we are concerned with the control of a hard disk drive (HDD) for repeatable and non-repeatable runout disturbance rejection.; During the course of this research several practical and experimental innovations were introduced. Among them we can mention: experimental implementation of RLS-based fully adaptive controllers for the first time applied to the laser-beam jitter control problem: introduction and experimental implementation of a new variable-order adaptive controller with applications to laser-beam jitter rejection and the control of hard disk drives; analytical and empirical investigation establishing connections between actuator saturation and spiky performance degradation; development and implementation of frequency-weighted minimum variance adaptive controllers for dealing with actuator saturation and for enforcing robust stability under additive uncertainty; experimental implementation of adaptive controllers for rejecting non-repeatable runout; and introduction, development and experimental implementation of controllers consisting of repetitive and adaptive components, which were demonstrated to be suitable for rejecting repeatable runout and non-repeatable runout simultaneously.