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In various applications in the field of control engineering, the estimation of the state variables of dynamic systems in the presence of unknown inputs plays an important role. Existing methods require the so-called observer matching condition to be satisfied, rely on the boundedness e variables or exhibit an increased observer order of at least twice the plant order. In this article, a novel observer normal form for strongly observable linear time-invariant multivariable systems is proposed. In contrast to classical normal forms, the proposed approach also takes the unknown inputs into account. The proposed observer normal form allows for the straightforward construction of a higher-order sliding mode observer, which ensures global convergence of the estimation error within finite time even in the presence of unknown bounded inputs. Its application is not restricted to systems which satisfy the aforementioned limitations of already existing unknown input observers. The proposed approach can be exploited for the reconstruction of unknown inputs with bounded derivative and robust state-feedback control, which is shown by means of a tutorial example. Numerical simulations confirm the effectiveness of the presented work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel robust fixed-time control approach for the trajectory tracking control of a fully actuated marine surface vessel (MSV) subject to system uncertainties and external disturbances. First, a nominal fixed-time controller is originally designed based on the bi-limit homogeneous method. The nominal fixed-time controller can guarantee the position and velocity tracking errors converge to zero in fixed time in the absence of lumped disturbance. Then, a new type of fixed-time disturbance observer is introduced to estimate the lumped disturbance in fixed time. Finally, a robust fixed-time controller is developed by integrating the nominal fixed-time controller with the fixed-time disturbance observer. The robust fixed-time controller can guarantee the position and velocity tracking errors converge to zero in fixed time even in the presence of lumped disturbance. Benefiting from the feedforward disturbance compensation, the robust fixed-time controller has the strong robustness and excellent disturbance attenuation capability. Numerical simulations and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed control approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of decentralised robust tracking and model following is investigated for a class of uncertain large-scale interconnected systems with both any time-varying delays and any dead-zone input constraints. By combining an adaptive approach with a multiply integral inequality proposed recently in the control literature, a new design method is developed so that (i) the designed decentralised robust tracking control schemes are direct, i.e. not the complicated ones composed of two parts, which can overwhelm the dead-zone input constraints; (ii) it is unnecessary to know any information on the characteristic parameters of dead-zone functions and the time-varying delays, which makes the decentralised robust tracking control rather simple. It is also proved that the local tracking error between the output of each actual subsystem with delays and input constraints and the dynamical signals of the corresponding local reference model is uniformly exponentially bounded. Finally, a numerical example is also given to describe the design procedure and the simulations of this numerical example are implemented to demonstrate the validity of the theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the trajectory tracking control problem of a planar vertical take-off and landing (PVTOL) aircraft in the presence of position constraints and external disturbances. A novel robust constrained control approach is proposed by incorporating the barrier Lyapunov function (BLF) and nonlinear damping items within the framework of dynamic surface control design. The dynamic surface control is used to avoid the 'explosion of terms' problem of the traditional backstepping control. The tan-type BLF is utilised to preserve the position tracking errors always within the predefined position constraints. The nonlinear damping items are applied to handle the effect of external disturbances. The uniform ultimate boundedness of the resulting closed-loop system is rigorously proved through the Lyapunov's direct method. A distinct feature of the proposed control approach is that it is a general methodology for the trajectory tracking control of PVTOL aircraft with or without position constraints. Both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations illustrate the effectiveness and benefits of the proposed control approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an adaptive robust boundary controller is designed for an unstable heat equation with external disturbance flowing into the control end. The disturbance and uncertainty effect is cancelled out in the closed-loop system by using on-line approximation of disturbance upper-bound provided as an output of adaptive robust update law. The asymptotic stability of the controlled system in the presence of unknown disturbance and/or parametric uncertainties is proved utilising the Lyapunov theorem. Unlike previous researches, the control implementation does not require prior knowledge of unknown disturbance. Moreover, the controller does not require measuring the system states or estimating the system states by an observer. The adaptive robust controller can be regarded as a combination of the best qualities of the adaptive controller and the robust controller with no prior knowledge of system uncertainty, and asymptotic tracking error performance. Numerical simulations and comparisons are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, a command-filtered sensor-based backstepping controller is proposed for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with actuator dynamics. The command filter is introduced to prompt the virtual control law to be limited in a certain range and the corresponding state to subsequently be restricted to a certain area. When using the sensor-based backstepping recursive method, precise models of the UAVs are not required because the controller is not sensitive to the external disturbance. The actuator dynamics are compensated without prior knowledge of the mathematical model of the executing agency. Besides, a robust compensator is developed for the virtual control law of the first subsystem of the UAV, which shows strong robustness against the uncertainties of the aerodynamic coefficients and external disturbances. Moreover, the closed-loop system is proven stable in the sense that the signals are bounded. A numerical simulation is carried out to verify the effectiveness of the developed controller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new robust adaptive controller is investigated to force an underactuated surface marine vessel to follow a predefined parameterised path at a desired speed, despite actuator saturation and the presence of model uncertainties as well as environmental disturbances induced by waves, wind and sea-currents. To ensure robustness of the path-following controller, time-varying constraint on the off-track error (i.e. the maximal distance from the ship to the reference path) is considered. To address the off-track error constraint the tan-barrier Lyapunov function is incorporated with the control scheme, where the idea of auxiliary design system introduced in Chen, Sam, and Ren (2011) is adopted and its states are used in combination with backstepping and Lyapunov synthesis to adaptive tracking control design with guaranteed stability. Furthermore, the command filters are adopted to implement physical constraints on the virtual control laws so that analytic differentiation of the virtual control laws is avoided. We show that the proposed robust adaptive control law is able to guarantee semi-global uniform ultimate bounded stability of the closed-loop system. Numerical simulations and experimental results are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a modified Smith predictor design is proposed for enhanced control of non-minimum phase unstable second-order time-delay processes with/without zero. The proposed method involves the design of two controllers, i.e. set-point tracking controller and disturbance rejection controller. Set-point tracking controller is designed as a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) in series with a lag filter using direct synthesis method. The disturbance rejection controller is designed as a PID in series with a lead/lag filter based on direct synthesis method. Set-point weighting is considered for minimising the overshoots. The proposed method is applied by simulation on several second-order unstable processes. Robustness studies have been carried out using the small-gain theorem. The method gives good nominal and robust control performances. Significant improvement in the disturbance rejection is obtained with the proposed method when compared to the recently reported methods in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The focus of this paper is on the design and simulation of robust tracking control for an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle (AHV), which is affected by high nonlinearity, uncertain parameters and input constraints. The linearisation method is employed for the longitudinal AHV model about a specific trim condition, and then considering the additive uncertainties of three parameters, the linearised model is just in the form of affine parameter dependence. From this point, the linear parameter-varying method is applied to design the desired controller. The poles for the closed-loop system of the linearised model are placed into a desired vertical strip, and the quadratic stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed. Input constraints of the AHV are addressed by additional linear matrix inequalities. Finally, the designed controller is evaluated on the nonlinear AHV model and simulation results demonstrate excellent tracking performance with good robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a complex gain margin of discrete-time linear quadratic regulator (DLQR) and its application to a consensus problem of multi-agent higher order linear systems. Since the consensus problem can be converted into a robust control problem with perturbation expressed by complex numbers, and since the classical gain and phase margins are not enough to handle the current case, we study the so-called ‘disc margin’ which is somehow a combination of gain and phase margins. We first compute the disc margin of DLQR controller based on a Lyapunov argument, which is simple but yields a relaxed result over those previously reported in the literature. Then, it is shown that the disc margin can be enlarged arbitrarily when the system is asymptotically null controllable with bounded controls and when a low-gain feedback is employed. Based on this fact, the discrete-time consensus problem is solved by a DLQR-based consensus controller. Simulation study shows that the DLQR-based consensus controller has better robustness property against model uncertainties in the input channel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A robust control oriented identification approach is proposed to deal with the identification of errors-in-variables models (EIVMs), which are corrupted with input and output noises. Based on normalised coprime factor model (NCFM) representations, a frequency-domain perturbed NCFM for an EIVM is derived according to a geometrical explanation for the v-gap metric. As a result, identification of the EIVM is converted into that of the NCFM. Besides an identified nominal NCFM, its worst case error has to be quantified. Unlike other traditional control-oriented identification methods, the v-gap metric is employed to measure the uncertainties including a priori information on the disturbing noises and the worst case error for the resulting nominal NCFM. Since this metric is also used as an optimisation criterion, the associate parameter estimation problem can be effectively solved by linear matrix inequalities. Finally, a numerical simulation shows the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, cooperative output feedback control of a group of nonholonomic mobile agents is considered. Distributed observer-based cooperative control laws are proposed with the aid of Lyapunov techniques and results from graph theory. Robustness of the stability of the closed-loop systems with the proposed control laws is considered. The effectiveness of the proposed controllers is verified by simulation results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on fuzzy control techniques, this article is concerned with the problem of robust reliable control for a near space vehicle (NSV) with parametric uncertainties and actuator faults. The nonlinear dynamics of a NSV is represented by the Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy models, and then the actuator fault model and fuzzy state-space observer are developed. Next, the fuzzy observer-based robust reliable control strategy is proposed. It is proved that the fuzzy control systems for the NSV is reliable in the sense that the closed-loop system is asymptotically stable and the actuator components can operate well in the presence of some actuator faults. The developed theoretical results are in the form of linear matrix inequalities, which can be readily solved via standard numerical software. Finally, simulation results are given to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonlinear H∞ synthesis is developed to solve the tracking control problem into a 3-DOF helicopter prototype. Planning of periodic motions under a virtual constraints approach is considered prior the controller design in order to achieve our goal. A local H∞ controller is derived by means of a certain perturbation of the differential Riccati equations that appear while solving the corresponding H∞ control problem for the linearised system. Stabilisability and detectability properties of the control system are thus ensured by the existence of the proper solutions of the unperturbed differential Riccati equations, and hence the proposed synthesis procedure obviates an extra verification work of these properties. Due to the nature of the approach, the resulting controller additionally yields the desired robustness properties against unknown but bounded external disturbances. Convergence and robustness of the proposed design are supported by simulation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the problem of delay-dependent robust H∞ control for uncertain stochastic Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy systems with time-varying state and input delays is investigated. The parameter uncertainties are assumed to be time-varying and norm bounded. Through construction of a new Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, the delay-dependent robust H∞ control scheme is presented in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). By solving these LMIs, a desired fuzzy controller can be obtained. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the developed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]