Global Practical Tracking Via Adaptive Output Feedback for Uncertain Nonlinear Systems Without Polynomial Constraint

This article investigates global practical output tracking via adaptive output feedback for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems. Remarkably, the control problem under investigation is in the context of unknown control directions and output feedback, which severely restricts the system nonlinearities. Nevertheless, the growth on the unknown system nonlinearities in this article is extended from polynomial (of output) to arbitrary function, and meanwhile no further a priori information is required on the reference signal to be tracked. Specifically, sufficiently smooth pseudosign and pseudo-dead-zone functions are introduced acting as substitutions of sign and dead-zone functions in the literature, respectively. Typically, based on the pseudo-dead-zone function, a delicate estimate on the unknown system nonlinearities is established and a novel Lyapunov function is proposed. This, together with the elegant system performance analysis, is quite critical to remove the polynomial constraint and overcome the technical obstacle stemming from the essential extension. Additionally owing to the two refined functions, the use of smooth domination/treatment is moderately avoided in control design that enables the established control strategy to be tighter and less conservative. It turns out that under the proposed adaptive output-feedback controller, all the closed-loop system states are globally bounded, while the system tracking error enters a prescribed \boldsymbol {\lambda } neighborhood of the origin in finite time and remains inside thereafter. A simulation example illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.