Transient performance analysis in robust nonlinear adaptive control

This paper deals with the problem of controlling unknown linear systems in the presence of strictly proper unmodelled dynamics and bounded disturbances. Adaptive controllers that ensure the closed-loop global (uniform) stability and asymptotic performances can be designed following either the backstepping approach or the certainty-equivalence method. The main shortcoming of the involved controllers is that they do not allow quantification of the closed-loop transient behaviour. In this paper, the transient issue is addressed for backstepping adaptive controllers. A L∞ bound on the tracking error is explicitly given as a function of the design parameters. This shows that the error can be made arbitrarily small by sufficiently increasing the design gains.