A new adaptive output-feedback controller against unknown control directions and intrinsic growth

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper addresses global output-feedback stabilisation in the context of unknown control directions and intrinsic unmeasurable-states-dependent growth, and focuses on rectifying the substantial deficiencies in the related works and developing a new adaptive output-feedback controller essentially reducing conservativeness. First, a varying parameter which takes value 1 or , instead of in an unbounded countable set, is specialised to capture the unknown control direction and accordingly a supervisory mechanism is delicately constructed to decide when to switch the parameter from 1 to or from to 1. A dynamic high gain, rather than a switching one, is appointed to compensate the serious system uncertainties. Then, the wanted controller is constructed, for which the design functions and design parameters are recursively generated by backstepping method (instead of analytically defined owing to the unknown control coefficients). Based on the designations and supervisory mechanism, it turns out that no Zeno phenomenon occurs, and global boundedness and convergence (to zero) hold, both for the resulting closed-loop system. An example is given to show the effectiveness and the advantage of the proposed scheme.