Output feedback control with performance recovery analysis for a class of time-delay nonlinear systems

Abstract

A class of nonlinear systems is considered in this paper which contains multiple time-varying delays and additional disturbances. Motivated by a robust model-free state-feedback controller, an observer-based output-feedback controller is designed to achieve uniformly ultimately bounded tracking. A high-gain-like observer is designed to estimate the unmeasurable current states utilizing the delayed output, and the estimated states are further used to facilitate the development of the output-feedback controller. The control input is saturated to avoid the side effects resulting from the high-gain-like observer’s peaking phenomenon. Under some sufficient conditions, it is proved that the saturation of the controller will no longer take place after a specific time, and both the estimation error and the tracking error will be uniformly ultimately bounded. In the stability analysis, Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals are implemented to alleviate the difficulties resulting from the delays. Relationships among the delays, the desired trajectories, and the maximal tolerable error are identified. Behaviors of the closed-loop system under different observation and control gains are also analyzed. A two-link revolute robotic arm is taken as an example to conduct a series of simulations, and the results show that the output-feedback controller can recover the performance of the corresponding state-feedback controller.