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