Adaptive robust stabilisation for a class of uncertain nonlinear time-delay dynamical systems

Abstract

The problem of adaptive robust stabilisation is considered for a class of uncertain nonlinear dynamical systems with multiple time-varying delays. It is assumed that the upper bounds of the nonlinear delayed state perturbations are unknown and that the time-varying delays are any non-negative continuous and bounded functions which do not require that their derivatives have to be less than one. In particular, it is only required that the nonlinear uncertainties, which can also include time-varying delays, are bounded in any non-negative nonlinear functions which are not required to be known for the system designer. For such a class of uncertain nonlinear time-delay systems, a new method is presented whereby a class of continuous memoryless adaptive robust state feedback controllers with a rather simpler structure is proposed. It is also shown that the solutions of uncertain nonlinear time-delay systems can be guaranteed to be uniformly exponentially convergent towards a ball which can be as small as desired. Finally, as an application, an uncertain nonlinear time-delay ecosystem with two competing species is given to demonstrate the validity of the results.