Robust Time-Varying Tracking Control of Sandwich Nonlinear Systems with Sandwiched Saturation Nonlinearity

Abstract

This paper addresses the output-tracking control problem for a class of nonlinear sandwich systems with external disturbances and model uncertainties. Sandwich systems are a special class of nonlinear systems in the cascade structure, which are made up of several distinct subsystems while the non-smooth nonlinear functions are sandwiched among their separate subsystems. This paper concentrates on the sandwich systems consisting of two arbitrary-order nonlinear cascaded subsystems, while the saturation nonlinearity is sandwiched between them. The robust control law is designed such that the output of the sandwich system tracks the desired time-varying reference signal despite the saturation occurrence. Due to the characteristics of the saturation function and also the existence of the external disturbances and model uncertainties, the considered problem is facing some serious challenges. To deal with these difficulties, the design procedure is divided into two phases. In the first phase, the second subsystem and the sandwiched saturation nonlinearity are considered. In this phase, by utilizing the backstepping approach, the desired input signal of the saturation function is designed. In the second phase, the control input of the first subsystem is designed based on the sliding mode technique in a way that the output of the first subsystem tracks the desired signal which is obtained in the first phase. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is applied to a practical sandwich system.