Delay Estimation Using Variable Regression

Systems with unknown delay are very common in industry. Conveyor belts, long pipe-lines or any transportation line are typical sources of system delay where the system input goes to one end of the transportation line (e. g. output valve of a reservoir tank) and the output is measured at the other end of the line (e. g. the level of receiving tank). Traditional online methods of delay estimation do not directly estimate the system delay but rather replace it by a large number of unknown parameters in the system model. In this paper, the unknown delay is directly estimated and no additional parameters are used in the system model. Experimental results are also presented to demonstrate the applicability of the method in adaptive control.