This paper presents designing an adaptive state feedback controller (ASFC) for a magnetic levitation system (MLS), which is an unstable system and has high nonlinearity and represents a challenging control problem. First, a nonadaptive state feedback controller (SFC) is designed by linearization about a selected equilibrium point and designing a SFC by pole-placement method to achieve maximum overshoot of 1.5% and settling time of 1s (5% criterion). When the operating point changes, the designed controller can no longer achieve the design specifications, since it is designed based on a linearization about a different operating point. This gives rise to utilizing the adaptive control scheme to parameterize the state feedback controller in terms of the operating point. The results of the simulation show that the operating point has significant effect on the performance of nonadaptive SFC, and this performance may degrade as the operating point deviates from the equilibrium point, while the ASFC achieves the required design specification for any operating point and outperforms the state feedback controller from this point of view.
