Decentralized robust adaptive control of nonlinear systems with unmodeled dynamics

The authors present a decentralized robust adaptive output feedback control scheme for a class of large-scale nonlinear systems of the output feedback canonical form with unmodeled dynamics. A modified dynamic signal is introduced for each subsystem to dominate the unmodeled dynamics and an adaptive nonlinear damping is used to counter the effects of the interconnections. It is shown that under certain assumptions, the proposed decentralized adaptive control scheme guarantees that all the signals in the closed-loop system are bounded in the presence of unmodeled dynamics, high-order interconnections and bounded disturbances. Furthermore, by choosing the design constants appropriately, the tracking error can be made arbitrarily small regardless of the interconnections, disturbances, and unmodeled dynamics in the system. An illustration example demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.