A novel adaptive-gain disturbance estimator-based asymptotic adaptive tracking control for uncertain nonlinear systems

This article focuses on the asymptotic tracking control problem for uncertain nonlinear systems subject to both multiple disturbances and parametric uncertainties. To address this issue, a parameter adaptation law is synthesized to deal with the parametric uncertainties, and an adaptive-gain disturbance estimator (ADE) is constructed to estimate the mismatched and matched disturbances, and compensate them in feedforward channels, which eliminates the impact of disturbances on tracking performance. Meanwhile, an updated law for estimator gain driven by the estimation errors is utilized in the ADE when facing unknown upper bounds of disturbances, which reduces the conservatism of estimator gain selection and is beneficial to practical implementation. Based on the parameter adaption technique and the presented ADE approach, a composite controller is proposed to ensure an excellent asymptotic output tracking performance. The stability analysis shows the proposed controller can attain asymptotic tracking performance in the presence of both time-variant disturbances and parametric uncertainties. Comparative simulation results of the application to a robot manipulator reveal the validity of the developed approach.