A differential flatness theory approach to observer-based adaptive fuzzy control of MIMO nonlinear dynamical systems

The paper proposes a solution to the problem of observer-based adaptive fuzzy control for MIMO nonlinear dynamical systems (e.g. robotic manipulators). An adaptive fuzzy controller is designed for a class of nonlinear systems, under the constraint that only the system’s output is measured and that the system’s model is unknown. The control algorithm aims at satisfying the $H_\infty $ tracking performance criterion, which means that the influence of the modeling errors and the external disturbances on the tracking error is attenuated to an arbitrary desirable level. After transforming the MIMO system into the canonical form, the resulting control inputs are shown to contain nonlinear elements which depend on the system’s parameters. The nonlinear terms which appear in the control inputs are approximated with the use of neuro-fuzzy networks. Moreover, since only the system’s output is measurable the complete state vector has to be reconstructed with the use of a state observer. It is shown that a suitable learning law can be defined for the aforementioned neuro-fuzzy approximators so as to preserve the closed-loop system stability. With the use of Lyapunov stability analysis, it is proven that the proposed observer-based adaptive fuzzy control scheme results in $H_{\infty }$ tracking performance.