An integral sliding-mode parallel control approach for general nonlinear systems via piecewise affine linear models

The fundamental problem of stabilizing a general nonaffine continuous-time nonlinear system is investigated via piecewise affine linear models (PALMs) in this article. A novel integral sliding-mode parallel control (ISMPC) approach is developed, where an uncertain piecewise affine system (PWA) is constructed to model a nonaffine continuous-time nonlinear system equivalently on a compact region containing the origin. A piecewise sliding-mode parallel controller is designed to globally stabilize the PALM and, consequently, to semiglobally stabilize the original nonlinear system. The proposed scheme enjoys three favorable features: (i) some restrictions on the system input channel are eliminated, thus the developed method is more relaxed compared with the published approaches; (ii) it is convenient to be used to deal with both matched and unmatched uncertainties of the system; and (iii) the proposed piecewise parallel controller generates smooth control signals even around the boundaries between different subspaces, which makes the developed control strategy more implementable and reliable. Moreover, we provide discussions about the universality analysis of the developed control strategy for two kinds of typical nonlinear systems. Simulation results from two numerical examples further demonstrate the performance of the developed control approach

System identification and adaptive current balancing ON/OFF control of DC-DC switch mode power converter

PhD ThesisReliability becomes more and more important in industrial application of Switch Mode Power Converters (SMPCs). A poorly performing power supply in a power system can influence its operation and potentially compromise the entire system performance in terms of efficiency. To maintain a high reliability, high performance SMPC effective control is necessary for regulating the output of the SMPC system. However, an uncertainty is a key factor in SMPC operation. For example, parameter variations can be caused by environmental effects such as temperature, pressure and humidity. Usually, fixed controllers cannot respond optimally and generate an effective signal to compensate the output error caused by time varying parameter changes. Therefore, the stability is potentially compromised in this case. To resolve this problem, increasing interest has been shown in employing online system identification techniques to estimate the parameter values in real time. Moreover, the control scheme applied after system identification is often called “adaptive control” due to the control signal selfadapting to the parameter variation by receiving the information from the system identification process. In system identification, the Recursive Least Square (RLS) algorithm has been widely used because it is well understood and easy to implement. However, despite the popularity of RLS, the high computational cost and slow convergence speed are the main restrictions for use in SMPC applications. For this reason, this research presents an alternative algorithm to RLS; Fast Affline Projection (FAP). Detailed mathematical analysis proves the superior computational efficiency of this algorithm. Moreover, simulation and experiment result verify this unique adaptive algorithm has improved performance in terms of computational cost and convergence speed compared with the conventional RLS methods. Finally, a novel adaptive control scheme is designed for optimal control of a DC-DC buck converter during transient periods. By applying the proposed adaptive algorithm, the control signal can be successfully employed to change the ON/OFF state of the power transistor in the DC-DC buck converter to improve the dynamic behaviour. Simulation and experiment result show the proposed adaptive control scheme significantly improves the transient response of the buck converter, particularly during an abrupt load change conditio

Decentralised sliding mode control for nonlinear interconnected systems with uncertainties

With the advances in science and technology, nonlinear large-scale interconnected systems have widely appeared in the real life. Traditional centralised control methods have inevitable disadvantages when they are used to deal with complex nonlinear interconnected systems with uncertainties. In connection with this, people desire to develop the novel control strategy which can be applied to complex interconnected systems. Therefore, decentralised sliding mode control (SMC) for interconnected systems has attracted great attention in related fields due to its advantages, for instance, simple structure, low cost of calculation, fast response, reduced-order sliding mode dynamics and insensitivity to matched variation of parameters and disturbances in systems. This thesis focuses on the development of decentralised SMC for nonlinear interconnected systems with uncertainties under certain assumptions. Several methods and different techniques have been considered in design of the controller to improve the robustness. The main contributions of this thesis include: • The state feedback decentralised SMC is developed for nonlinear interconnected systems with matched uncertainty and mismatched unknown interconnections. A state feedback decentralised SMC strategy, under the assumption that all system states are accessible, is proposed to attenuate the impact of the uncertainties by using bounds on uncertainties and interconnections. The bounds used in the design are fully nonlinear which provide higher applicability for different complex interconnected systems. Especially, for this fully nonlinear system, the proposed method does not need to use the technique of linearisation, which is widely used in existing work to deal with nonlinear interconnected systems with uncertainties. • The dynamic observer is applied to complex nonlinear interconnected systems with matched and mismatched uncertainties. This dynamic observer can estimate the system states which can not be achieved during the controller design. The proposed method has great identification ability with small estimated errors for the states of nonlinear interconnected systems with matched and mismatched uncertainties. It should be pointed out that the considered uncertainties of nonlinear interconnected systems have general forms, which means that the proposed method can be effectively used in more generalised nonlinear interconnected systems. • A variable structure observer-based decentralised SMC is proposed to control a class of nonlinear interconnected systems with matched and mismatched uncertainties. Based on the designed dynamic observer, a dynamic decentralised output feedback SMC using outputs and estimated states is presented to control the interconnected systems with matched and mismatched uncertainties. The nonlinear interconnections are employed in the control design to reduce the conservatism of the developed results. The bounds of the uncertainties are relaxed which are nonlinear and take more general forms. Moreover, the limitation for the interconnected system is reduced when compared with the existing results in which the proposed strategies adopt the full-order observer. Besides that, the presented method improves the robustness of nonlinear interconnected systems to be against the effects of uncertainties. This thesis also provides several numerical and practical simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed decentralised SMC for nonlinear interconnected systems with matched uncertainty, mismatched uncertainty and nonlinear interconnections

Fixed-time safe tracking control of uncertain high-order nonlinear pure-feedback systems via unified transformation functions

summary:In this paper, a fixed-time safe control problem is investigated for an uncertain high-order nonlinear pure-feedback system with state constraints. A new nonlinear transformation function is firstly proposed to handle both the constrained and unconstrained cases in a unified way. Further, a radial basis function neural network is constructed to approximate the unknown dynamics in the system and a fixed-time dynamic surface control (FDSC) technique is developed to facilitate the fixed-time control design for the uncertain high-order pure-feedback system. Combined with the proposed unified transformation function and the FDSC technique, an adaptive fixed-time control strategy is proposed to guarantee the fixed-time tracking. The novel original results of the paper allow to design the independent unified flexible fixed-time control strategy taking into account the actual possible constraints, either present or missing. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the proposed fixed-time tracking control strategy

Genetic-Algorithm-Assisted Sliding-Mode Control for Networked State-Saturated Systems over Hidden Markov Fading Channels

National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61903143, 61933007, 61873058, 61873148, 61673174 and 61773162; Research Fund for the Taishan Scholar Project of Shandong Province of China; Shanghai Sailing Program of China under Grant 19YF1412100; 111 Project of China under Grant B17017; Royal Society of the U.K.; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Fault tolerant control for nonlinear aircraft based on feedback linearization

The thesis concerns the fault tolerant flight control (FTFC) problem for nonlinear aircraft by making use of analytical redundancy. Considering initially fault-free flight, the feedback linearization theory plays an important role to provide a baseline control approach for de-coupling and stabilizing a non-linear statically unstable aircraft system. Then several reconfigurable control strategies are studied to provide further robust control performance:- A neural network (NN)-based adaption mechanism is used to develop reconfigurable FTFC performance through the combination of a concurrent updated learninglaw. - The combined feedback linearization and NN adaptor FTFC system is further improved through the use of a sliding mode control (SMC) strategy to enhance the convergence of the NN learning adaptor. - An approach to simultaneous estimation of both state and fault signals is incorporated within an active FTFC system.The faults acting independently on the three primary actuators of the nonlinear aircraft are compensated in the control system.The theoretical ideas developed in the thesis have been applied to the nonlinear Machan Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system. The simulation results obtained from a tracking control system demonstrate the improved fault tolerant performance for all the presented control schemes, validated under various faults and disturbance scenarios.A Boeing 747 nonlinear benchmark model, developed within the framework of the GARTEUR FM-AG 16 project “fault tolerant flight control systems”,is used for the purpose of further simulation study and testing of the FTFC scheme developed by making the combined use of concurrent learning NN and SMC theory. The simulation results under the given fault scenario show a promising reconfiguration performance

Nondeterministic hybrid dynamical systems

This thesis is concerned with the analysis, control and identification of hybrid dynamical systems. The main focus is on a particular class of hybrid systems consisting of linear subsystems. The discrete dynamic, i.e., the change between subsystems, is unknown or nondeterministic and cannot be influenced, i.e. controlled, directly. However changes in the discrete dynamic can be detected immediately, such that the current dynamic (subsystem) is known. In order to motivate the study of hybrid systems and show the merits of hybrid control theory, an example is given. It is shown that real world systems like Anti Locking Brakes (ABS) are naturally modelled by such a class of linear hybrids systems. It is shown that purely continuous feedback is not suitable since it cannot achieve maximum braking performance. A hybrid control strategy, which overcomes this problem, is presented. For this class of linear hybrid system with unknown discrete dynamic, a framework for robust control is established. The analysis methodology developed gives a robustness radius such that the stability under parameter variations can be analysed. The controller synthesis procedure is illustrated in a practical example where the control for an active suspension of a car is designed. Optimal control for this class of hybrid system is introduced. It is shows how a control law is obtained which minimises a quadratic performance index. The synthesis procedure is stated in terms of a convex optimisation problem using linear matrix inequalities (LMI). The solution of the LMI not only returns the controller but also the performance bound. Since the proposed controller structures require knowledge of the continuous state, an observer design is proposed. It is shown that the estimation error converges quadratically while minimising the covariance of the estimation error. This is similar to the Kalman filter for discrete or continuous time systems. Further, we show that the synthesis of the observer can be cast into an LMI, which conveniently solves the synthesis problem

Adaptive Control of Systems with Quantization and Time Delays

This thesis addresses problems relating to tracking control of nonlinear systems in the presence of quantization and time delays. Motivated by the importance in areas such as networked control systems (NCSs) and digital systems, where the use of a communication network in NCS introduces several constraints to the control system, such as the occurrence of quantization and time delays. Quantization and time delays are of both practical and theoretical importance, and the study of systems where these issues arises is thus of great importance. If the system also has parameters that vary or are uncertain, this will make the control problem more complicated. Adaptive control is one tool to handle such system uncertainty. In this thesis, adaptive backstepping control schemes are proposed to handle uncertainties in the system, and to reduce the effects of quantization. Different control problems are considered where quantization is introduced in the control loop, either at the input, the state or both the input and the state. The quantization introduces difficulties in the controller design and stability analysis due to the limited information and nonlinear characteristics, such as discontinuous phenomena. In the thesis, it is analytically shown how the choice of quantization level affects the tracking performance, and how the stability of the closed-loop system equilibrium can be achieved by choosing proper design parameters. In addition, a predictor feedback control scheme is proposed to compensate for a time delay in the system, where the inputs are quantized at the same time. Experiments on a 2-degrees of freedom (DOF) helicopter system demonstrate the different developed control schemes.publishedVersio