Asymptotic tracking of a reference state for systems with a feedforward structure (Q1961998)

The authors present a sufficient condition for the solvability of the following asymptotic tracking problem for a nonlinear system in feedforward form: Given an admissible reference trajectory for the system, design a time-varying continuous feedback law such that this trajectory is a globally asymptotically stable solution for the (now nonautonomous) closed loop system. The construction of the feedback relies on a Lyapunov function for a suitable transformation of the error equation, which is shown to exist under the assumed condition. Furthermore, it is shown that one even obtains global uniform asymptotic stability in case of a periodic reference trajectory, which allows a repeated application of the result to cascaded feedforward systems.