Nonlinear adaptive control for power integrator triangular systems by switching linear controllers

Summary In this paper, a nonlinear adaptive stabilizer is designed for a class of power integrator triangular systems with the following four features: (i) the chained integrators have the powers of positive odd numbers, which makes the linearization of the studied system uncontrollable; (ii) the nonlinear function contains the virtual control variables; (iii) the bound of the nonlinear parameters entering the function nonlinearity is not required to be known a priori; and (iv) there exists an unknown control coefficient with the unknown bound in the control channel. Our proposed adaptive controller is a switching type controller, in which the designed adaptive stabilizer takes a two-step procedure: a linear stabilizing controller containing the tuning gains is first designed by the adding a power integrator technique. Switching logic is then proposed to tune online the gains in a switching manner. The proposed adaptive controller globally asymptotically stabilizes the considered system in the sense that, for any initial conditions, the state converges to the origin while all the signals of the closed-loop system are bounded. Simulation studies clarify and verify the approach. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.