Robust control design for nonlinear uncertain systems with an unknown time-varying control direction (Q3129386)

The aim of this paper is to study the robust control of a class of nonlinear uncertain systems having the form: \[ \dot x= f(x,t)+\Delta f'(x,t)+a(t)u(x,t), \] where \(x\in\mathbb{R}\) is the state, \(u\in\mathbb{R}\) is the control input, \(f(x,t)\) and \(\Delta f'(x,t)\) are known and unknown dynamics of the system and \(a(t)\) characterizes the time-varying direction of motion with respect to a given control. The objective of this paper is to generalize the results contained in a previous paper, where the authors studied the problem of designing robust control in the case of an unknown but constant and bounded-away-from-zero control direction. Here, they consider an unknown and time-varying control direction. Summarizing, the robust control design consists of three integrated parts: 1) selection of robust control via Lyapunov's direct method; 2) a scheme that on-line identifies the unknown time-varying control direction; 3) formulate a continuous shifting law that changes the sign of robust control smoothly in tracking the identified sign of the time-varying control direction. Finally, a simulation example is presented to illustrate the proposed robust control design.