MTN optimal control of MIMO non-affine nonlinear time-varying discrete systems for tracking only by output feedback

In practice, many controlled plants are equipped with MIMO non-affine nonlinear systems. The existing methods for tracking control of time-varying nonlinear systems mostly target the systems with special structures or focus only on the control based on neural networks which are unsuitable for real-time control due to their computation complexity. It is thus necessary to find a new approach to real-time tracking control of time-varying nonlinear systems. In this paper, a control scheme based on multi-dimensional Taylor network (MTN) is proposed to achieve the real-time output feedback tracking control of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) non-affine nonlinear time-varying discrete systems relative to the given reference signals with online training. A set of ideal output signals are selected by the given reference signals, the optimal control laws of the system relative to the selected ideal output signals are set by the minimum principle, and the corresponding optimal outputs are taken as the desired output signals. Then, the MTN controller (MTNC) is generated automatically to fit the optimal control laws, and the conjugate gradient (CG) method is employed to train the network parameters offline to obtain the initial parameters of MTNC for online learning. Addressing the time-varying characteristics of the system, the back-propagation (BP) algorithm is implemented to adjust the weight parameters of MTNC for its desired real-time output tracking control by the given reference signals, and the sufficient condition for the stability of the system is identified. Simulation results show that the proposed control scheme is effective and the actual output of the system tracks the given reference signals satisfactorily. (C) 2019 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.