Reinforcing robustness of adaptive dynamic surface control

Adaptive dynamic surface control (ADSC) design was proposed as an alternative to adaptive backstepping, capable of curing the ‘explosion of complexity’ problem, caused by the repeated differentiations of the so called intermediate control signals. However, as it is clearly demonstrated in this work, ADSC schemes are sensitive to modeling uncertainties and/or additive external disturbances. In fact, it is shown that a uniformly bounded exogenous perturbation of unknown upper bound may easily destabilize the closed‐loop system. Subsequently, a constructive methodology based on the recently developed by the authors prescribed performance control technique, is proposed, which combined with an ADSC design, results in a modified scheme possessing significantly increased robustness properties. Simulation studies illustrate the approach. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.