Further results on global practical tracking via adaptive output feedback for uncertain nonlinear systems

This paper is concerned with the global practical tracking via adaptive output feedback for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems. The system under investigation possesses function control coefficients, the polynomial-of-output growth rate and serious unknowns in the system nonlinearities and the reference signal, and hence is essentially different from those in the closely related literature. To solve the problem, a high-gain observer is introduced to reconstruct the unmeasured system states. The involved high gain is the multiplication of two dynamic gains: one is to compensate the polynomial-of-output in the system growth rate, and the other one is to overcome the serious unknowns in the system and reference signal and the extra system nonlinearities in function control coefficients. Based on the high-gain observer, an adaptive output-feedback controller is successfully designed to guarantee that, for any initial condition of the system, all signals of the closed-loop system are bounded, and the tracking error will be prescribed sufficiently small after a finite time. A numerical example demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.