Design of an amplitude-bounded output feedback adaptive neural control with guaranteed componentwise performance

This paper proposes a methodology for the design of a mixed output feedback linear and adaptive neural controller that guarantees componentwise boundedness of the tracking error within an a priori specified compact polyhedron for an uncertain nonlinear system. The approach is based on the design of a robust invariant ellipsoidal set where the adaptive neural network (NN) control is modeled as an amplitude-bounded signal. A linear error observer is employed to recover the unmeasured states, and a linear gain controller is used to enforce the containment of the ellipsoidal set within the performance polyhedron. The analysis and design of the observer and linear controller is set up as an LMI problem. The linear observer/controller scheme is then augmented with a general adaptive NN element having the purpose of approximating and compensating for the unknown nonlinearities thus providing performance improvement. The only requirement for the adaptive control signals is that their amplitudes must be confined within pre-specified limits. For this purpose, a novel mechanism called adaptive control redistribution is introduced to manage the adaptive NN control confinement during the online operation. A numerical example is used to illustrate the design methodology.     

Neural networks for advanced control of robot manipulators

Presents an approach and a systematic design methodology to adaptive motion control based on neural networks (NNs) for high-performance robot manipulators, for which stability conditions and performance evaluation are given. The neurocontroller includes a linear combination of a set of off-line trained NNs, and an update law of the linear combination coefficients to adjust robot dynamics and payload uncertain parameters. A procedure is presented to select the learning conditions for each NN in the bank. The proposed scheme, based on fixed NNs, is computationally more efficient than the case of using the learning capabilities of the neural network to be adapted, as that used in feedback architectures that need to propagate back control errors through the model to adjust the neurocontroller. A practical stability result for the neurocontrol system is given. That is, we prove that the control error converges asymptotically to a neighborhood of zero, whose size is evaluated and depends on the approximation error of the NN bank and the design parameters of the controller. In addition, a robust adaptive controller to NN learning errors is proposed, using a sign or saturation switching function in the control law, which leads to global asymptotic stability and zero convergence of control errors. Simulation results showing the practical feasibility and performance of the proposed approach to robotics are given.     

Transverse function control with prescribed performance guarantees for underactuated marine surface vehicles

This paper studies the problem of stabilizing reference trajectories (also called as the trajectory tracking problem) for underactuated marine vehicles under predefined tracking error constraints. The boundary functions of the predefined constraints are asymmetric and time‐varying. The time‐varying boundary functions allow us to quantify prescribed performance of tracking errors on both transient and steady‐state stages. To overcome difficulties raised by underactuation and nonzero off‐diagonal terms in the system matrices, we develop a novel transverse function control approach to introduce an additional control input in backstepping procedure. This approach provides practical stabilization of any smooth reference trajectory, whether this trajectory is feasible or not. By practical stabilization, we mean that the tracking errors of vehicle position and orientation converge to a small neighborhood of zero. With the introduction of an error transformation function, we construct an inverse‐hyperbolic‐tangent‐like barrier Lyapunov function to show practical stability of the closed‐loop systems with prescribed transient and steady‐state performances. To deal with unmodeled dynamic uncertainties and external disturbances, we employ neural network (NN) approximators to estimate uncertain dynamics and present disturbance observers to estimate unknown disturbances. Subsequently, we develop adaptive control, based on NN approximators and disturbance estimates, that guarantees the prescribed performance of tracking errors during the transient stage of on‐line NN weight adaptations and disturbance estimates. Simulation results show the performance of the proposed tracking control.     

Robust dynamic surface control of flexible joint robots using recurrent neural networks

A robust neuro-adaptive controller for uncertain flexible joint robots is presented. This control scheme integrates H-infinity disturbance attenuation design and recurrent neural network adaptive control technique into the dynamic surface control framework. Two recurrent neural networks are used to adaptively learn the uncertain functions in a flexible joint robot. Then, the effects of approximation error and filter error on the tracking performance are attenuated to a prescribed level by the embedded H-infinity controller, so that the desired H-infinity tracking performance can be achieved. Finally, simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.     

Discrete-time neural network output feedback control of nonlinear discrete-time systems in non-strict form

An adaptive neural network (NN)-based output feedback controller is proposed to deliver a desired tracking performance for a class of discrete-time nonlinear systems, which are represented in non-strict feedback form. The NN backstepping approach is utilized to design the adaptive output feedback controller consisting of: (1) an NN observer to estimate the system states and (2) two NNs to generate the virtual and actual control inputs, respectively. The non-causal problem encountered during the control design is overcome by using a dynamic NN which is constructed through a feedforward NN with a novel weight tuning law. The separation principle is relaxed, persistency of excitation condition (PE) is not needed and certainty equivalence principle is not used. The uniformly ultimate boundedness (UUB) of the closed-loop tracking error, the state estimation errors and the NN weight estimates is demonstrated. Though the proposed work is applicable for second order nonlinear discrete-time systems expressed in non-strict feedback form, the proposed controller design can be easily extendable to an nth order nonlinear discrete-time system.     

Direct adaptive neural network controller for a class of nonlinear systems based on fuzzy estimator of the control error

A new approach of direct adaptive control of single input single output nonlinear systems in affine form using single-hidden layer neural network (NN) is introduced. In contrast to the algorithms in the literature, the weights adaptation laws are based on the control error and not on the tracking error or its filtered version. Since the control error is being expressed in terms of the NN controller, hence its weights updating laws are obtained via back-propagation concept. A fuzzy inference system (FIS) with heuristically defined rules is introduced to provide an estimate of this error based on the past history of the system behaviour. The stability of the closed loop is studied using Lyapunov theory. A fixed structure is then proposed for the FIS and the design parameters reduce to the parameters of the NN. The method is reproducible and does not require any pre-training of the network weights.     

On convex parameterization of robust control design for minimizing (conditional) performance at risk

This paper introduces performance at risk and conditional performance at risk as design metrics for the formulation of robust control design. These two metrics are used to characterize the high percentile or tail distribution of a performance specification when system uncertain parameters are random variables described by statistical distributions. The probabilistic robust control design is then formulated as a minimization problem with respect to the (conditional) performance at risk or as a constrained problem in terms of them. Performance specifications in terms of the high percentile or tail distribution are more stringent than that are defined in terms of the average (mean) value, which are often used in current literature for probabilistic robust control. Furthermore, the convexity of the conditional performance at risk does not have particular requirements on the underlying distribution of uncertain parameters; thus, convex optimization can be applied to the probabilistic robust control with respect to uncertain parameters with general distributions. The proposed probabilistic robust approach is applied to search solutions to linear matrix inequality containing random parametric uncertainties as well as to design a stabilizing controller for polynomial vector fields subject to random parametric uncertainties. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

电驱动刚性机器人的鲁棒神经网络复合控制

采用逐步逆向的设计思想，提出一种新的电驱动刚性机器人轨迹跟踪的鲁棒神经网络复合控制策略，该策略不仅能有效地消除模型不确定性的影响，而且可避免复杂的求导运算以及对关节角加速度可测的要求。给出了控制器的具体组成和神经网络连接权的在线学习算法，理论表明该算法能保证跟踪误差及神经网络连接权估计最终一致有界，仿真结果也验证了算法的有效性。     

Adaptive neural integral sliding‐mode control for tracking control of fully actuated uncertain surface vessels

This paper develops a novel adaptive neural integral sliding‐mode control to enhance the tracking performance of fully actuated uncertain surface vessels. The proposed method is built based on an integrating between the benefits of the approximation capability of neural network (NN) and the high robustness and precision of the integral sliding‐mode control (ISMC). In this paper, the design of NN, which is used to approximate the unknown dynamics, is simplified such that just only one simple adaptive rule is needed. The ISMC, which can eliminate the reaching phase and offer higher tracking performance compared to the conventional sliding‐mode control, is designed such that the system robust against the approximation error and stabilize the whole system. The design procedure of the proposed controller is constructed according to the backstepping control technique so that the stability of the closed‐loop system is guaranteed based on Lyapunov criteria. The proposed method is then tested on a simulated vessel system using computer simulation and compared with other state‐of‐the‐art methods. The comparison results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.     

Adaptive neural control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with unknown time delay

A neural network (NN)‐based robust adaptive control design scheme is developed for a class of nonlinear systems represented by input–output models with an unknown nonlinear function and unknown time delay. By approximating on‐line the unknown nonlinear functions with a three‐layer feedforward NN, the proposed approach does not require the unknown parameters to satisfy the linear dependence condition. The control law is delay independent and possible controller singularity problem is avoided. It is proved that with the proposed neural control law, all the signals in the closed‐loop system are semiglobally bounded in the presence of unknown time delay and unknown nonlinearity. A simulation example is presented to demonstrate the method. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Neural Network Adaptive Robust Control Of Siso Nonlinear Systems In A Normal Form

In this paper, performance oriented control laws are synthesized for a class of single‐input‐single‐output (SISO) n‐th order nonlinear systems in a normal form by integrating the neural networks (NNs) techniques and the adaptive robust control (ARC) design philosophy. All unknown but repeat‐able nonlinear functions in the system are approximated by the outputs of NNs to achieve a better model compensation for an improved performance. While all NN weights are tuned on‐line, discontinuous projections with fictitious bounds are used in the tuning law to achieve a controlled learning. Robust control terms are then constructed to attenuate model uncertainties for a guaranteed output tracking transient performance and a guaranteed final tracking accuracy. Furthermore, if the unknown nonlinear functions are in the functional ranges of the NNs and the ideal NN weights fall within the fictitious bounds, asymptotic output tracking is achieved to retain the perfect learning capability of NNs. The precision motion control of a linear motor drive system is used as a case study to illustrate the proposed NNARC strategy.     

Online Adaptive Approximate Optimal Tracking Control with Simplified Dual Approximation Structure for Continuous-time Unknown Nonlinear Systems

This paper proposes an online adaptive approximate solution for the infinite-horizon optimal tracking control problem of continuous-time nonlinear systems with unknown dynamics. The requirement of the complete knowledge of system dynamics is avoided by employing an adaptive identifier in conjunction with a novel adaptive law, such that the estimated identifier weights converge to a small neighborhood of their ideal values. An adaptive steady-state controller is developed to maintain the desired tracking performance at the steady-state, and an adaptive optimal controller is designed to stabilize the tracking error dynamics in an optimal manner. For this purpose, a critic neural network (NN) is utilized to approximate the optimal value function of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, which is used in the construction of the optimal controller. The learning of two NNs, i.e., the identifier NN and the critic NN, is continuous and simultaneous by means of a novel adaptive law design methodology based on the parameter estimation error. Stability of the whole system consisting of the identifier NN, the critic NN and the optimal tracking control is guaranteed using Lyapunov theory; convergence to a near-optimal control law is proved. Simulation results exemplify the effectiveness of the proposed method.      

Multiple model-based event-triggered adaptive control of a class of discrete-time nonlinear systems

In this study, the problem of event-triggered-based adaptive control (ETAC) for a class of discrete-time nonlinear systems with unknown parameters and nonlinear uncertainties is considered. Both neural network (NN) based and linear identifiers are used to approximate the unknown system dynamics. The feedback output signals are transmitted, and the parameters and the NN weights of the identifiers are tuned in an aperiodic manner at the event sample instants. A switching mechanism is provided to evaluate the approximate performance of each identifier and decide which estimated output is utilised for the event-triggered controller design, during any two events. The linear identifier with an auxiliary output and an improved adaptive law is introduced so that the nonlinear uncertainties are no longer assumed to be Lipschitz. The number of transmission times are significantly reduced by incorporating multiple model schemes into ETAC. The boundedness of both the parameters of identifiers and the system outputs is demonstrated though the Lyapunov approach. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Decoupled control using neural network-based sliding-mode controller for nonlinear systems

In this paper, an adaptive neural network sliding-mode controller design approach with decoupled method is proposed. The decoupled method provides a simple way to achieve asymptotic stability for a class of fourth-order nonlinear system. The adaptive neural sliding-mode control system is comprised of neural network (NN) and a compensation controller. The NN is the main regulator controller, which is used to approximate an ideal computational controller. The compensation controller is designed to compensate for the difference between the ideal computational controller and the neural controller. An adaptive methodology is derived to update weight parts of the NN. Using this approach, the response of system will converge faster than that of previous reports. The simulation results for the cart–pole systems and the ball–beam system are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the method. In addition, the experimental results for seesaw system are given to assure the robustness and stability of system.     

Adaptive recurrent neural network control using a structure adaptation algorithm

This paper proposes an adaptive recurrent neural network control (ARNNC) system with structure adaptation algorithm for the uncertain nonlinear systems. The developed ARNNC system is composed of a neural controller and a robust controller. The neural controller which uses a self-structuring recurrent neural network (SRNN) is the principal controller, and the robust controller is designed to achieve L ² tracking performance with desired attenuation level. The SRNN approximator is used to online estimate an ideal tracking controller with the online structuring and parameter learning algorithms. The structure learning possesses the ability of both adding and pruning hidden neurons, and the parameter learning adjusts the interconnection weights of neural network to achieve favorable approximation performance. And, by the L ² control design technique, the worst effect of approximation error on the tracking error can be attenuated to be less or equal to a specified level. Finally, the proposed ARNNC system with structure adaptation algorithm is applied to control two nonlinear dynamic systems. Simulation results prove that the proposed ARNNC system with structure adaptation algorithm can achieve favorable tracking performance even unknown the control system dynamics function.     

Output feedback adaptive DSC for nonlinear systems with guaranteed L-infinity tracking performance

In this paper, the problem of output tracking for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems is considered. First, neural networks are employed to cope with uncertain nonlinear functions, based on which state estimation is constructed. Then, an output feedback control system is designed by using dynamic surface control (DSC). To guarantee the L-infinity tracking performance, an initialization technique is presented. The main feature of the scheme is that explosion of complex- ity problem in backstepping control is avoided, and there is no need to update the unknown parameters including control gains as well as neural networks weights, the adaptive law with one update parameter is necessary only at the first design step. It is proved that all signals of the closed-loop system are semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded and the L-infinity performance of system tracking error can be guaranteed. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

机械手的神经网络稳定自适应控制

本文针对机械手轨迹跟随控制问题，提出了一种稳定的神经网络自适应控制器设计方法，这里机械的非线性动力学假设是未知的，提出方法是神经网络方法和扇区自适应变结构控制方法的集成，扇区变结构控制的作用有两个，其一是在系统神经网络控制失灵的情形下提供闭环系统的全局稳定性；其二是在神经网络的近似域内改进系统的跟随性能，本文采用李雅普诺夫稳定理论给出了的稳定性和跟随误差收敛性的证明，并且通过数字仿真验证了提出方法     

Neural net robot controller: Structure and stability proofs

A multilayer neural net (NN) controller for a general serial-link robot arm is developed. The structure of the NN controller is derived using a filtered error approach. It is argued that standard backpropagation tuning, when used for real-time closed-loop control, can yield unbounded NN weights if: (1) the net can not exactly reconstruct a certain required control function, (2) there are bounded unknown disturbances in the robot dynamics, or (3) the robot arm has more than one link (i.e. nonlinear case). On-line weight tuning algorithms including correction terms to backpropagation, plus an added robustifying signal, guarantee tracking as well as bounded weights. The correction terms involve a second-orderforward-propagated wave in the backprop network.     

Adaptive Neural Network-Based Control for a Class of Nonlinear Pure-Feedback Systems With Time-Varying Full State Constraints

In this paper, an adaptive neural network (NN) control approach is proposed for nonlinear pure-feedback systems with time-varying full state constraints. The pure-feedback systems of this paper are assumed to possess nonlinear function uncertainties. By using the mean value theorem, pure-feedback systems can be transformed into strict feedback forms. For the newly generated systems, NNs are employed to approximate unknown items. Based on the adaptive control scheme and backstepping algorithm, an intelligent controller is designed. At the same time, time-varying Barrier Lyapunov functions (BLFs) with error variables are adopted to avoid violating full state constraints in every step of the backstepping design. All closedloop signals are uniformly ultimately bounded and the output tracking error converges to the neighborhood of zero, which can be verified by using the Lyapunov stability theorem. Two simulation examples reveal the performance of the adaptive NN control approach.      

Observer-based Adaptive Optimal Control for Unknown Singularly Perturbed Nonlinear Systems With Input Constraints

This paper introduces an observer-based adaptive optimal control method for unknown singularly perturbed nonlinear systems with input constraints. First, a multi-time scales dynamic neural network (MTSDNN) observer with a novel updating law derived from a properly designed Lyapunov function is proposed to estimate the system states. Then, an adaptive learning rule driven by the critic NN weight error is presented for the critic NN, which is used to approximate the optimal cost function. Finally, the optimal control action is calculated by online solving the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation associated with the MTSDNN observer and critic NN. The stability of the overall closed-loop system consisting of the MTSDNN observer, the critic NN and the optimal control action is proved. The proposed observer-based optimal control approach has an essential advantage that the system dynamics are not needed for implementation, and only the measured input/output data is needed. Moreover, the proposed optimal control design takes the input constraints into consideration and thus can overcome the restriction of actuator saturation. Simulation results are presented to confirm the validity of the investigated approach.