Composite-Observer-Based Output-Feedback Control for Nonlinear Time-Delay Systems With Input Saturation and Its Application

Abstract

This paper makes the first attempt to address the global output-feedback tracking control problem for nonlinear systems in the presence of time delay, nonsymmetric input saturation, and external disturbances. As one of the distinctive features, the growth assumptions imposed on system time-delay nonlinearities are removed in this output-feedback case. To handle the unmeasurable states and disturbances, the composite state observer and disturbance observer are constructed simultaneously. Based on these two observers, an output-feedback controller is designed by introducing an auxiliary system to eliminate the effect of input saturation and using a Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional to deal with time delay. It is shown that the designed controller can ensure the closed-loop system to be globally uniformly ultimately bounded. Particularly, instead of converging to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of zero as in related results, the tracking error is proven to be bounded by the saturation input error and design parameters that can be explicitly tuned. Finally, a chemical reactor system is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed scheme.