Practical tracking of uncertain nonlinear systems via adaptive event-triggered output feedback

Abstract This paper investigates the problem of global practical tracking by adaptive event-triggered output feedback for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with unknown time-varying control coefficients. The nonlinear systems under consideration allow more general growth restriction, e.g., unknown constant and output-polynomial function coupled to the unmeasurable states. Based on non-separation principle, an adaptive event-triggered output feedback controller is proposed by combining dynamic high-gain scaling approach with backstepping method. It is worth emphasizing that a novel updating law of the high-gain is introduced to overcome the system nonlinearities and the serious uncertainties mentioned above. The controller proposed guarantees that the states of the resulting closed-loop systems are globally bounded, while the tracking error converges to a prescribed arbitrarily small neighborhood of the origin after a finite time. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.