Adaptive output feedback tracking for time-delay nonlinear systems with unknown control coefficient and application to chemical reactors

Abstract

In this paper, the problem of global adaptive output feedback tracking is considered for a class of highly nonlinear time-delay systems with unknown control coefficient and relaxed lower-triangular growth constraints. Based on the non-separation principle, a non-identifier-based adaptive output feedback controller is proposed by designing a novel update law of the dynamic gain in observer and controller. The novel gain can simultaneously compensate the uncertain parameters, the output-polynomial growth rate and the unknown time-varying delay. The proposed controller is well universal attributed to using the non-identification adaptive mechanism, and all design parameters are easy to get by simple calculation. With the help of Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals and Barbalat’s lemma, it is shown that the solutions of the resulting closed-loop system are globally uniformly ultimately bounded by improving the backstepping design and dynamic high-gain scaling approach; the adaptive tracking is achieved under any small pre-given tracking error. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed controller is illustrated by two examples.