Event‐triggered practical tracking control via switching for a class of uncertain high‐order nonlinear systems with unknown input powers and control directions

Abstract

This article is devoted to the event‐triggered practical tracking control for a class of high‐order nonlinear systems with serious uncertainties. Remarkably, the serious uncertainties are greatly reflected from the unknown control directions and input powers which give rise to essential obstacles in control design and hence lead to incapability of the traditional control methods on this topic. To solve the control problem, a novel switching event‐triggered control scheme is proposed by a skillful incorporation of logic‐based switching mechanism into the event‐triggered one. Specifically, two pivotal events are smartly chosen to give the event‐triggered mechanism for the determination of the sampling times. In particular, one of the events is used to give the switching varying mechanism, by which the controller parameters are respectively switched in two groups of sequences which are carefully chosen for the compensation of serious uncertainties. Under the proposed switching event‐triggered mechanism, a state‐feedback controller is designed which guarantees that all the signals of the closed‐loop system are bounded while system output practically tracks the reference signal, along with a finite number of switching of controller parameters as well as the exclusion of the Zeno phenomenon. Finally, simulation examples are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.