Automatica 94 (2018) 324–333
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Automatica
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/automatica
Brief paper
Periodic event-triggered robust output feedback control for nonlinear
uncertain systems with time-varying disturbance
✩
Jun Yang
a
, Jiankun Sun
a
, Wei Xing Zheng
b
, Shihua Li
a,
*
a
School of Automation, Southeast University, Key Laboratory of Measurement and Control of CSE, Ministry of Education, Nanjing 210096, China
b
School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW 2751, Australia
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 29 December 2016
Received in revised form 26 March 2018
Accepted 9 April 2018
Available online 29 May 2018
Keywords:
Periodic event-triggered output feedback
control
Nonlinear uncertainties
Time-varying disturbance
Feedback domination
Disturbance compensation
a b s t r a c t
This paper investigates the periodic event-triggered robust output feedback control problem for a class of
nonlinear uncertain systems subject to time-varying disturbance. By means of the feedback domination
approach and disturbance compensation technique, a new framework of periodic event-triggered robust
control strategy is developed in the form of output feedback, which encompasses a discrete-time event-
triggering transmission scheme that is only intermittently monitored at sampling instants and a discrete-
time output feedback controller consisting of a set of linear difference equations. The proposed robust
method may reduce the communication resource utilization as compared to the non-event triggering
schemes while maintaining a desirable closed-loop system performance even in the presence of a general
class of time-varying disturbance and nonlinear uncertainties. The closed-loop system under the proposed
control scheme is actually modeled as a hybrid system, and it is shown that the global practical stability of
the closed-loop hybrid system is guaranteed by selecting a sufficiently large scaling gain and a sufficiently
small sampling period. Finally, the experimental results on a DC–DC buck power converter are presented
to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control approaches.
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
In networked control systems, the bandwidth of communi-
cation network and computation resources are generally lim-
ited (Chen, Ho, & Huang, 2015; Guo, Ding, & Han, 2014; Lehman
& Lunze, 2012; Wang & Lemmon, 2011), therefore the research
on event-triggered control strategy has attracted a great deal of
attentions in recent decades (Liu & Jiang, 2015; Postoyan, Tabuada,
Nešić, & Anta, 2015; Tabuada, 2007; Velasco & Marti, 2003; Xing,
Wen, Liu, Su, & Cai, 2017; Xiong, Yu, Patel, & Yu, 2016). Quite
different from the conventional time-triggered control (Fridman,
Seuret, & Richard, 2004; Khalil, 2004; Mao, Jiang, & Shi, 2010; Qian
& Du, 2012; Zhang, Xin, & Xu, 2013), the main idea of the event-
triggered control is to execute control calculation and communi-
cation tasks only when a pre-defined state-dependent condition is
verified. Instead of only pursuing better control performance while
ignoring resources utilization in the time-triggered control, the
aim of event-triggered control is to reduce the resources utilization
✩
The material in this paper was not presented at any conference. This paper was
recommended for publication in revised form by Associate Editor Tongwen Chen
under the direction of Editor Ian R. Petersen.
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: j.yang84@seu.edu.cn (J. Yang), jk.sun1990@seu.edu.cn
(J. Sun), w.zheng@westernsydney.edu.au (W.X. Zheng), lsh@seu.edu.cn (S. Li).
while retaining a satisfactory closed-loop control performance.
Hence, the event-triggered control is more suitable in applications
where low energy consumption is sought, or the communication
is costly or limited (Guo et al., 2014; Mazo & Tabuada, 2011;
Selivanov & Fridman, 2016; Sun, Yu, Chen, & Xing, 2015; Zhu, Jiang,
& Feng, 2014).
Due to the significance claimed above, various event-triggered
control strategies have been developed, such as continuous-time
event-triggered control (Fang & Xiong, 2014; Lunze & Lehmann,
2010; Tabuada, 2007; Xing et al., 2017; Zhang, Feng, Yan, & Chen,
2014), self-triggered control (Anta & Tabuada, 2010; Dimarogonas,
Frazzoli, & Johansson, 2012; Tahir & Mazumder, 2015; Velasco &
Marti, 2003; Wang & Lemmon, 2009) and sampling-based event-
triggered control (Heemels, Donkers, & Teel, 2013; Heemels, Pos-
toyan, Donkers, Teel, Anta, Tabuada, & Nešić, 2015; Peng & Han,
2013; Peng & Yang, 2013; Wang, Postoyan, Nešić, & Heemels,
2016). Compared with the continuous-time event-triggered con-
trol and the self-triggered control, the sampling-based event-
triggered control scheme does not need to continuously monitor
the transmission scheme, and thereby, the Zeno-behavior can be
naturally excluded. Toward that end, the sampling-based event-
triggered control has received considerable attentions of investi-
gations recently. For example, the sampling-based event-triggered
output feedback control can be found in the literatures for linear
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.automatica.2018.04.042
0005-1098/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.