Adaptive output feedback control of uncertain nonlinear systems based on dynamic surface control technique

An adaptive output feedback control approach is studied for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems in the parametric output feedback form. Unlike the previous works on the adaptive output feedback control, the problem of ‘explosion of complexity’ of the controller in the conventional backstepping design is overcome in this paper by introducing the dynamic surface control (DSC) technique. In the previous schemes for the DSC technique, the time derivative for the virtual controllers is assumed to be bounded. In this paper, this assumption is removed. It can be proven that the resulting closed‐loop system is stable in the sense that all the signals are semi‐global uniformly ultimately bounded and the system output tracks the reference signal to a bounded compact set. A simulation example is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.