Global adaptive stabilisation for nonlinear systems with unknown control directions and input disturbance

This paper addresses the global adaptive stabilisation via switching and learning strategies for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems. Remarkably, the systems in question simultaneously have unknown control directions, unknown input disturbance and unknown growth rate, which makes the problem in question challenging to solve and essentially different from those in the existing literature. To solve the problem, an adaptive scheme via switching and learning is proposed by skilfully integrating the techniques of backstepping design, adaptive learning and adaptive switching. One key point in the design scheme is the introduction of the learning mechanism, in order to compensate the unknown input disturbance, and the other one is the design of the switching mechanism, through tuning the design parameters online to deal with the unknown control directions, unknown bound and period of input disturbance and unknown growth rate. The designed controller guarantees that all the signals of the resulting closed-loop systems are bounded, and furthermore, the closed-loop system states globally converge to zero.