In this paper, we investigate the problem of identifying or modeling nonlinear dynamical systems undergoing periodic and period-like (recurrent) motions. For accurate identification of nonlinear dynamical systems, the persistent excitation condition is normally required to be satisfied. Firstly, by using localized radial basis function networks, a relationship between the recurrent trajectories and the persistence of excitation condition is established. Secondly, for a broad class of recurrent trajectories generated from nonlinear dynamical systems, a deterministic learning approach is presented which achieves locally-accurate identification of the underlying system dynamics in a local region along the recurrent trajectory. This study reveals that even for a random-like chaotic trajectory, which is extremely sensitive to initial conditions and is long-term unpredictable, the system dynamics of a nonlinear chaotic system can still be locally-accurate identified along the chaotic trajectory in a deterministic way. Numerical experiments on the Rossler system are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
PWL approximation of nonlinear dynamical systems, part I: structural stability