Adaptive learning control for general nonlinear systems with nonuniform trial lengths, initial state deviation, and unknown control direction

Summary This paper studies the iteration varying trail lengths problem for high‐order continuous‐time nonlinear systems, where the initial state may deviate from the desired value and the sign of input gain is unknown. First, to deal with the general nonlinear systems, a fuzzy approximation technique is applied for each dimension of the nonlinear function and the backstepping technique is then used for controller design and performance analysis. Moreover, to deal with the randomly varying trial length problem, we introduce a novel composite energy function for the asymptotic convergence analysis. Furthermore, the initial state deviation issue is resolved by introducing an initial state learning protocol such that the initial state tracking error converges to zero asymptotically. Last but not least, the unknown control direction is regulated by applying a Nussbaum function and the analysis in the presence of nonuniform trial lengths is strictly established. Based on these treatments, we prove that the tracking error converges to zero as iteration number increases and all signals are bounded. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is verified by numerical simulations.