Global regulation of feedforward nonlinear systems with unknown time-varying control coefficients and growth rate

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a regulation problem for a class of feedforward nonlinear systems with unknown control coefficients and unknown growth rate. More specifically, the unknown control coefficients are assumed to be time-varying and belong to ranges with unknown upper and lower bounds. Due to the described control coefficients with uncertain feedfoward nonlinearities, our considered system is the natural extension of the related existing results. In solving our control problem, a new adaptive controller is derived by constructing a Lyapunov function in backstepping-like procedure and utilizing appropriate parameters based on the gain scaling technique and Nussbaum function. The uniquely designed exponents of a dynamic gain overcome the difficulties caused from the unknown sign and unknown ranges of the control coefficients and uncertain nonlinearities and thus play a key role in system regulation. We give the rigorous system analysis and simulation results of the numerical example to certify our control method.