Automatica 52 (2015) 185–191
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Automatica
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/automatica
Brief paper
Adaptive tracking control for a class of uncertain switched nonlinear
systems
✩
Xudong Zhao
a,b
, Xiaolong Zheng
a
, Ben Niu
c
, Liang Liu
a
a
College of Engineering, Bohai University, Jinzhou 121013, Liaoning, China
b
Chongqing SANY High-intelligent Robots Co., Ltd., Chongqing, 401120, China
c
College of Mathematics and physics, Bohai University, Jinzhou 121013, Liaoning, China
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 24 April 2014
Received in revised form
17 October 2014
Accepted 2 November 2014
Keywords:
Switched nonlinear systems
Adaptive backstepping
Common Lyapunov function
Tracking control
a b s t r a c t
This paper is concerned with the problem of tracking control for a class of switched nonlinear systems in
lower triangular form with unknown functions and arbitrary switchings. Two classes of state feedback
controllers are constructed by adopting the adaptive backstepping technique, and both of them are
designed by using the common Lyapunov function (CLF) method. The first controller is designed under
multiple adaptive laws. Then, the second one is designed based on constructing a maximum common
adaptive parameter, which can overcome the problem of over-parameterization of the first controllers.
It is shown that the designed state-feedback controllers can ensure that all the signals remain bounded
and the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of the origin. Finally, simulation results are
presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
In the past decades, switched systems have attracted much
attention since it can be used to describe a large number of physical
and engineering systems, such as networked control systems
(Zhao, Hill, & Liu, 2009), near space vehicle control systems (Bao,
Li, Chang, Niu, & Yu, 2010), circuit and power systems (Homaee,
Zakariazadeh, & Jadid, 2014), to list a few. As the most important
issues in the study of switched linear or nonlinear systems, stability
analysis and control synthesis are discussed extensively by a lot
of researchers, and many excellent results have been obtained for
various types of switched systems under arbitrary switching or
constraint switching; see e.g., Wang, Wang, and Shi (2009), Xiong,
Lam, Gao, and Ho (2005), Zhang and Shi (2009), Zhao and Hill
(2008a,b), Zhao, Liu, Yin, and Li (2014), Zhao, Yin, Li, and Niu (2014),
Zhao, Zhang, Shi, and Liu (2012) and references therein.
✩
This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (61203123, 61304054, 61403041), the Liaoning Excellent Talents in
University (LR2014035), and the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation,
China (ZR2012FQ019). The material in this paper was not presented at any
conference. This paper was recommended for publication in revised form by
Associate Editor Andrey V. Savkin under the direction of Editor Ian R. Petersen.
E-mail addresses: xdzhaohit@gmail.com (X. Zhao), zxldwlsj@gmail.com
(X. Zheng), niubengz@gmail.com (B. Niu), liuliang1985125@gmail.com (L. Liu).
It is well known that the stability of a switched system
under arbitrary switching can be guaranteed if a CLF exists for
all subsystems (Vu & Liberzon, 2005). Therefore, CLF has been
extensively used for control synthesis of switched linear systems
(Briat & Seuret, 2012, 2013; Lian & Zhao, 2010; Liberzon, 2003;
Margaliot & Langholz, 2003; Xiang & Xiao, 2014). Recently, there
have been some results reported on the global stabilization
problem for switched nonlinear systems in strict-feedback form
under arbitrary switchings by using the backstepping technique
(Ma & Zhao, 2010; Wu, 2009). Meanwhile, Long and Zhao
(2012) investigated the global stabilization problem for a class of
switched nonlinear systems in the p-normal form by the so-called
power integrator backstepping design method. Unfortunately,
uncertainty is not taken into account in the aforementioned
papers, which widely exists in practical switched nonlinear
systems.
For general nonlinear systems in lower triangular form without
switchings, it has been shown in the literature (Chen, Liu, Liu, &
Lin, 2009; Krstić, Kokotović, & Kanellakopoulos, 1995) that the
adaptive backstepping method is a powerful tool for controller
design. As a base strategy in adaptive backstepping, the main
objective is to cancel the unknown nonlinearity of system by
constructing the virtual control functions and adaptive laws. This
design method is of course expected to be useful to stabilize
switched nonlinear systems with uncertainty. However, to the
best of the authors’ knowledge, there is not any related results on
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.automatica.2014.11.019
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