Adaptive output-feedback control for nonlinear time-delay systems in pure-feedback form

The main contribution of this paper is to develop an adaptive output-feedback control approach for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with unknown time-varying delays in the pure-feedback form. Both the non-affine nonlinear functions and the unknown time-varying delayed functions related to all state variables are considered. These conditions make the controller design difficult and challenging because the output-feedback controller should be designed using only the output information. In order to overcome these conditions, we design an observer-based adaptive dynamic surface controller where the time-delay effects are compensated by using appropriate Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals and the function approximation technique using neural networks. A first-order filter is added to the control input to avoid the algebraic loop problem caused by the non-affine structure. It is proved that all the signals in the closed-loop system are semi-globally uniformly bounded and the tracking error converges to an adjustable neighborhood of the origin.     

Observer-based terminal sliding mode control of non-affine nonlinear systems: Finite-time approach

This paper studies the problem of observer based fast nonsingular terminal sliding mode control schemes for nonlinear non-affine systems with actuator faults, unknown states, and external disturbances. A hyperbolic tangent function based extended state observer is considered to estimate unknown states, which enhances robustness by estimating external disturbance. Then, Taylor series expansion is employed for the non-affine nonlinear system with actuator faults, which transforms it to an affine form system to simplify disturbance observer and controller design. A finite time disturbance observer is designed to address unknown compound disturbances, which includes external disturbances and system uncertainties. A fast nonsingular terminal sliding mode with exponential function sliding mode is proposed to address output tracking. Simulation results show the proposed scheme is effective.     

Distributed robust event-triggered adaptive control for a class of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems with actuator saturation

This paper studies the event-triggered consensus control problem for high-order uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems with actuator saturation. By using a smooth Lipschitz function to approximate the saturation nonlinearity, an augment system and the Nussbaum function are adopted to deal with the residual terms of saturation nonlinearity based on adaptive backstepping method. Since excessive energy and communication resources will be consumed during the procedure to handle actuator saturation, two event-triggered mechanisms are proposed to save the communication resources and reduce the controllers’ update frequency. Whenever the triggered conditions are satisfied, the control signals transmitted to the actuators are updated and broadcasted to the neighboring area. A ’disturbance-like’ term is integrated so that the event-triggered control problem with actuator saturation can be transformed into a robust problem while the unknown disturbances are tackled by adaptive update laws. Moreover, the requirement for global communication topology known by all the agents is relaxed by introducing new estimators. All the signals in the closed-loop system are uniformly bounded and the consensus tracking errors are exponentially converged to a bounded set. Meanwhile, the Zeno behavior is excluded. Simulation results are employed to validate the advantages of our proposed methods.     

Global fast terminal sliding mode controller for hydraulic turbine regulating system with actuator dead zone

This paper investigates the frequency change problem of hydraulic turbine regulating system based on terminal sliding mode control method. By introducing a novel terminal sliding mode surface, a global fast terminal sliding mode controller is designed for the closed loop. This controller eliminates the slow convergence problem which arises in the terminal sliding mode control when the error signal is not near the equilibrium. Meanwhile, following consideration of the error caused by the actuator dead zone, an adaptive RBF estimator based on sliding mode surface is proposed. Through the dead zone error estimation for feed-forward compensation, the composite terminal sliding mode controller has been verified to possess an excellent performance without sacrificing disturbance rejection robustness and stability. Simulations have been carried out to validate the superiority of our proposed methods in comparison with other two other kinds of sliding mode control methods and the commonly used PID and FOPID controller. It is shown that the simulation results are in good agreement with the theoretical analysis.     

Event-triggered adaptive fault-tolerant control for nonlinear systems fusing static and dynamic information

In this paper, a novel event-triggered adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme is proposed for a class of nonlinear systems with unknown actuator faults. Multiplicative faults and additive faults are taken into account simultaneously, both of which may vary with time. Different from existing results, our controller fuses static reliability information and dynamic online information, which is helpful to enhance the fault-tolerant capability. With the aid of an event-triggering mechanism, an actuator switching strategy and a bound estimation approach, the communication burden is significantly reduced and the impacts of the actuator faults as well as the network-induced error are effectively compensated for. Moreover, by employing the prescribed performance control technique, the system tracking error can converge to a predefined arbitrarily small residual set with prescribed convergence rate and maximum overshoot, which implies that the proposed scheme is able to ensure rapid and accurate tracking. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

Composite learning adaptive sliding mode control of fractional-order nonlinear systems with actuator faults

This paper considers the tracking control of fractional-order nonlinear systems (FONSs) in triangular form with actuator faults by means of sliding mode control (SMC) and composite learning SMC (CLSMC). In SMC design, a fractional sliding surface is introduced, and an adaptation law is designed to update the estimation of the mismatched parametric uncertainty in the actuator faults. The proposed SMC can guarantee the convergence of the tracking error where a persistent excitation (PE) condition should be satisfied. To overcome this limitation, by using the online recorded data and the instantaneous data, a prediction error of the parametric uncertainty is defined. Both the tracking error and the prediction error are utilized to generate a composite learning law. A composite learning law is designed by using the prediction error and the tracking error. The proposed CLSMC can guarantee not only the stability of system but also the accurate estimation of the parametric uncertainties in the actuator faults. In CLSMC, only an interval-excitation (IE) condition that is weaker than the PE one should be satisfied. Finally, simulation example is presented to show the control performance of the proposed methods.     

Funnel-based adaptive fuzzy finite-time control for non-affine nonlinear systems preceded by unknown actuators

In this paper, an adaptive finite-time funnel control for non-affine strict-feedback nonlinear systems preceded by unknown non-smooth input nonlinearities is proposed. The input nonlinearities include backlash-like hysteresis and dead-zone. Unknown nonlinear functions are handled using fuzzy logic systems (FLS), based on the universal approximation theorem. An improved funnel error surface is utilized to guarantee the steady-state and transient predetermined performances while the differentiability problem in the controller design is averted. Using the Lyapunov approach, all the adaptive laws are extracted. In addition, an adaptive continuous robust term is added to the control input to relax the assumption of knowing the bounds of uncertainties. All the signals in the closed-loop system are shown to be semi-globally practically finite-time bounded with predetermined performance for output tracking error. Finally, comparative numerical and practical examples are provided to authenticate the efficacy and applicability of the proposed scheme.     

Fuzzy adaptive command filtered backstepping fault-tolerant control for a class of nonlinear systems with actuator fault

This paper investigates a class of nonlinear systems with actuator fault. In particular, fuzzy logic systems have been used to approximate the unknown nonlinear functions, backstepping procedure is adopted to design controller for the system with mismatched condition, command filter is utilized to eliminate the explosion of complexity of the backstepping and also to compensate the output of a filter subjected to the derivative of the virtual control. The stability of the closed-loop system and the convergence of the tracking error are proved via Lyapunov Theorem. In addition, two numerical simulation examples are illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

A fast terminal sliding mode control scheme with time-varying sliding mode surfaces

This paper proposes a novel fast terminal sliding mode (FTSM) control scheme, which accelerates convergence of the controlled system both in its approaching and after reaching the sliding manifold. The novelty lies in the design of time-varying sliding surface without a priori knowledge of the initial system states, so achieving insensitivity to the uncertainty of the initial states. Based on this, we design a corresponding FTSM control strategy, where the singularity problem of conventional terminal sliding mode (TSM) control systems is overcome by restricting the TSM surfaces to non-singular areas. We prove stability and finite-time convergence of the system with the proposed controller. Furthermore, we extend the proposed FTSM control scheme to high-order systems and discuss its application in practical systems. Preliminary simulation results and comparative studies demonstrate the validity of the proposed FTSM control scheme with the designed sliding surface.     

Fault-tolerant adaptive control for uncertain switched systems with time-varying delay and actuator faults based on sliding mode technique

This paper utilizes the sliding mode approach to tackle the issue of adaptive control for uncertain switched systems with time-varying delay and actuator faults. Firstly, a kind of mathematical model of switched time-varying delay systems under sudden actuator faults is defined. Then, a linear sliding manifold is constructed, followed by some adequate conditions for exponential stability of the switched systems running on the sliding phase. Furthermore, an adaptive fault-tolerant controller for handling the actuator degradation is designed and the reachability of the established sliding manifold is proved. At last, a series of simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solution.     

Adaptive distributed tracking control for non-affine multi-agent systems with state constraints and dead-zone input

In this paper, an adaptive distributed control protocol is proposed for non-affine multi-agent system with nonlinear dead-zone input and state constraints under the condition of directed topology. In order to overcome the difficulties caused by non-affine terms in the system, the nonlinear dynamics system is transformed. Then, the neural network technology is introduced to approximate the unknown non-affine terms for the obtained system. State constraints and dead-zone input are common system problems. In order to solve these problems, the barrier Lyapunov function is introduced in this paper. According to the barrier Lyapunov function and backstepping method, an adaptive distributed controller is designed, so that state variables do not violate constraint bounds and the system is not affected by dead-zone input. By Lyapunov stability theory, it is proved that the signals of each follower are cooperative semi-global uniform ultimate boundedness (CSUUB), and the outputs of the followers track the output of the leader. Simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Adaptive sliding mode control for uncertain Euler–Lagrange systems with input saturation

In this paper, the tracking control problem of uncertain Euler–Lagrange systems under control input saturation is studied. To handle system uncertainties, a leakage-type (LT) adaptive law is introduced to update the control gains to approach the disturbance variations without knowing the uncertainty upper bound a priori. In addition, an auxiliary dynamics is designed to deal with the saturation nonlinearity by introducing the auxiliary variables in the controller design. Lyapunov analysis verifies that based on the proposed method, the tracking error will be asymptotically bounded by a neighborhood around the origin. To demonstrate the proposed method, simulations are finally carried out on a two-link robot manipulator. Simulation results show that in the presence of actuator saturation, the proposed method induces less chattering signal in the control input compared to conventional sliding mode controllers.     

Adaptive output feedback neural network control of uncertain non-affine systems with unknown control direction

This paper deals with the problem of adaptive output feedback neural network controller design for a SISO non-affine nonlinear system. Since in practice all system states are not available in output measurement, an observer is designed to estimate these states. In comparison with the existing approaches, the current method does not require any information about the sign of control gain. In order to handle the unknown sign of the control direction, the Nussbaum-type function is utilized. In order to approximate the unknown nonlinear function, neural network is firstly exploited, and then to compensate the approximation error and external disturbance a robustifying term is employed. The proposed controller is designed based on strict-positive-real (SPR) Lyapunov stability theory to ensure the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system. Finally, two simulation studies are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed scheme.     

Event-triggered fuzzy control for nonlinear time-delay system with full-state constraints and unknown hysteresis

This article considers the nonlinear time-delay system with full-state constrains and actuator hysteresis. Compared with the previous research on input hysteresis phenomenon, all states in the system are required to be constrained in a bounded compact set and the direction of hysteresis is unknown. Thus, the system is difficult to be stabilized and get perfect error tracking performance, and the design procedure is more complicated. By combining barrier Lyapunov functions (BLFs) and Nussbaum functions, a new virtual controller is designed, which combines the properties of Nussbaum function with fuzzy logic systems (FLSs). Furthermore, considering that the rate-dependent characteristic of actuator hysteresis will adversely affect the stability of networked control systems (NCSs), a first-order filter is used to solve the problem, but it brings challenges to the design of Lyapunov–Krasovskii functions (KLFs). Thus, a new LKFs is constructed to compensate for the adverse effects of state delay on the nonlinear system. What’s more, this article propose event-triggered technique to solve the coupling effect of the system communication resource constrains. The proposed adaptive control strategy ensures the boundedness of all signals and does not violate the state constraints, and the controller avoids Zeno behavior, and the tracking error fluctuates around zero in a predetermined compression range. Finally, two simulations results verify the effectiveness of the adaptive control strategy.     

Event-triggered adaptive fuzzy tracking control for high-order stochastic nonlinear systems

This paper is concerned with event-triggered adaptive fuzzy tracking control for high-order stochastic nonlinear systems. The approach of fuzzy logic systems (FLSs) approximation is extended to high-order stochastic nonlinear systems to deal with the unknown nonlinear uncertainties. A novel high-order adaptive fuzzy tracking controller is firstly presented via a backstepping approach and event-triggering mechanism which can mitigate the unnecessary waste of computation and communication resources. Based on the above techniques, frequently-used growth assumptions imposed on unknown system nonlinearities are removed and the influence for the high order is handled. The proposed high-order adaptive fuzzy tracking control method not only deals with the influence of high order, but also ensures that the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of the origin in probability. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control method is illustrated by a numerical example.     

Distributed fault-tolerant consensus tracking control for multiple Lagrangian systems with preset error bound constraints

Actuator faults often occur in physical systems, which seriously affect the transient performance and control accuracy of the system. For the finite-time consensus tracking problem of multiple Lagrangian systems with actuator faults and preset error constraints, a novel distributed fault-tolerant controller is proposed in this paper. The proposed controller is developed based on the barrier Lyapunov function method and the adding a power integrator technique, which can not only guarantee the steady-state performance of the system but also its transient performance. Due to its strong sensitivity to the variation of system errors, the proposed controller can quickly eliminate the system initial errors and the error perturbations caused by actuator faults. That is, the controller can guarantee that the consensus error converges to zero in a finite time and is always constrained within the preset error bound. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed controller is verified by simulation of a multi-manipulator system.     

Barrier Lyapunov function-based decentralized adaptive neural control for uncertain high-order stochastic nonlinear interconnected systems with output constraints

Decentralized adaptive neural backstepping control scheme is developed for uncertain high-order stochastic nonlinear systems with unknown interconnected nonlinearity and output constraints. For the control of high-order nonlinear interconnected systems, it is assumed that nonlinear system functions are unknown. It is for the first time to control stochastic nonlinear high-order systems with output constraints. Firstly, by constructing barrier Lyapunov functions, output constraints are handled. Secondly, at each recursive step, only one adaptive parameter is updated to overcome over-parameterization problems, and RBF neural networks are used to identify unknown nonlinear functions so that the difficulties caused by completely unknown system functions and stochastic disturbances are tackled. Finally, based on the Lyapunov stability method, the decentralized adaptive control scheme via neural networks approximator is proposed, ultimately reducing the number of learning parameters. It is shown that the designed controller can guarantee all the signals of the resulting closed-loop system to be semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB), and the tracking errors for each subsystem are driven to a small neighborhood of zero. The simulation studies are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.     

Modeling and control of a piezoelectric actuator driven system with asymmetric hysteresis

This study describes the high-precision positioning control of a system with asymmetric hysteresis. A switching system concept is adopted to describe the Preisach-type hysteresis, and a systematic modeling procedure is established to obtain the parameters of the system. A piezoelectric actuator system driven by a voltage amplifier is used to verify the modeling accuracy. A control structure, comprising a feedforward controller and a PD-type feedback controller, is used to realize the high-precision positioning control of the piezoelectric actuator driven stage. To enhance tracking control, a high-frequency modified term is incorporated into the hysteresis model. The experimental results confirm that the addition of this modified term reduces the tracking error and prevents the controlling energy from being saturated.     

Event-triggered learning consensus of networked heterogeneous nonlinear agents with switching topologies

In this work, a lifted event-triggered iterative learning control (lifted ETILC) is proposed aiming for addressing all the key issues of heterogeneous dynamics, switching topologies, limited resources, and model-dependence in the consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs). First, we establish a linear data model for describing the I/O relationships of the heterogeneous nonlinear agents as a linear parametric form to make the non-affine structural MAS affine with respect to the control input. Both the heterogeneous dynamics and uncertainties of the agents are included in the parameters of the linear data model, which are then estimated through an iterative projection algorithm. On this basis, a lifted event-triggered learning consensus is proposed with an event-triggering condition derived through a Lyapunov function. In this work, no threshold condition but the event-triggering condition is used which plays a key role in guaranteeing both the stability and the iterative convergence of the proposed lifted ETILC. The proposed method can reduce the number of control actions significantly in batches while guaranteeing the iterative convergence of tracking error. Both rigorous analysis and simulations are provided and confirm the validity of the lifted ETILC.     

Event-triggered adaptive fault-tolerant control of uncertain non-affine systems with predefined performance

This paper is concerned with an event-triggered adaptive fault-tolerant problem for an uncertain non-affine system. The implicit function theorem and mean value theorem are utilized to transform a non-affine system into an affine one, and an extended state observer and a tracking differentiator are used to estimate unknown dynamics and the derivative of virtual control laws, respectively. Adaptive laws are designed for unknown faults, and an event-triggered control scheme with a time-varying threshold, based on a tracking error and adaptive parameters, is developed. The tracking error is steered to converge to a bounded set with the help of a predefined performance function, and its transient performance is improved despite of faults. The stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed by the theorem of the input-to-state practically stability, and the Zeno behavior is excluded. Finally, two examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.