1. Introduction
With the development of social technology and industry, more and more control systems show the complex and multimode characteristics. Switched systems as a kind of hybrid systems have been widely concerned. In recent years, researches on switched systems have made some achievements. For switched linear systems, there are more related results [
1,
2,
3,
4]. In [
5], an event-triggered based
control issue was investigated for a class of switched linear systems with bounded exogenous disturbances. In [
6], the non-fragile finite-time extended dissipative control problem is studied for discrete-time switched linear systems under a switching law with average dwell-time. For switched nonlinear systems, the research results are relatively less [
7,
8,
9]. For example, the multierror constraint control problem was first proposed under different coordinate transformations in [
10], and was successfully solved by using dwell time method. In [
11], an adaptive output feedback fault tolerant control problem was studied for switched nonstrict-feedback nonlinear systems based on the small-gain technique.
Similar to traditional control systems, it is often difficult to obtain the system states in the control process of switched systems. Then, it is necessary to design a corresponding state observer to eatimate the unmeasurable states [
12,
13,
14,
15,
16]. However, the switching signal is the unique feature of switched systems compared to other systems. This also makes the design of controller and observer more difficult. As we know, the state observer of a switched system also contains the switching signal. Then, is the switching signal consistent with that of the original control system or not? Moreover, due to the existing of nonlinear structures, these directly affect the design of the controllers. In this paper, an observer design method in which the switching signal is consistent with that of the original control system is considered, which makes it easier to observe the unavailable states. Moreover, the unknown system dynamics are considered in this paper, then an adaptive fuzzy observer is designed. The fuzzy based approach is one of the artificial intelligence techniques widely used in various applications [
17,
18,
19]. In [
17], an innovative approach to reducing the mesh-induced error in CFD analysis of an impinging jet using fuzzy logic was proposed.
In addition, both the input quantification problem and the state constraint issue are also considered. These problems are common in the actual production process, so the research of this paper has a certain practical application value. At present, the research on these problems is almost focused on the nonswitched systems [
20,
21,
22,
23,
24]. For example, in [
21] the fault-tolerant attitude control of flexible spacecraft is investigated over digital communication channels, where a uniform quantizer is considered with respect to the sensor signals and controller indexes. An adaptive neural control method was proposed for a class of nonlinear time-varying delayed systems with time-varying full-state constraints in [
22]. The related research results of switched systems are few and far between [
25,
26,
27]. This is also one of the motivations of this paper.
Inspired by the above analysis, this paper focuses on switched nonlinear systems with the input quantification problem and the state constraint issue. The fuzzy based observer is constructed to estimate unmeasurable states. The barrier Lyapunov function method is used to ensure the system states satisfy the corresponding constraint conditions. An adaptive output feedback controller is designed that can offset the effect caused by the input quantification by using the backstepping technique. Finally, simulation results further show the good performances of the proposed control scheme.
Compared with the existing results of switched systems, the main contribution of this paper is that the adaptive output feedback control problem for switched systems is studied. As far as we know, this is the first time in this kind of system to ensure that the system states meet the constraint conditions, and to overcome the impact of quantized input at the same time. Combining the barrier Lyapunov function method with backstepping technology, the adaptive controller is designed, and these problems are successfully solved.
This paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 shows the system description, the control objective, and the necessary assumption. In
Section 3, an fuzzy based observer is designed to estimate the unavailable system states.
Section 4 gives the design process of the adaptive controller by using barrier Lyapunov function method.
Section 5 expresses the main result and analyzes the stability of the closed-loop system. A simulation example is employed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach in
Section 6. Finally,
Section 7 provides the conclusions.
2. System Description
In this paper, the following switched uncertain nonlinear system is considered
where
,
and
are the system state vectors,
represents the system output. The function
is the switching signal, which is assumed to be a piecewise continuous (from the right) function of time, and
represents the number of subsystems. In addition,
indicates that the
th subsystem is in working state.
stands for the system control input, which is also the output of the quantizer (the input quantization will be introduced later),
is a smooth nonlinear function, which is unknown,
is the bounded disturbance, and satisfies
with
being a constant. It is worth noting that
is unmeasurable, and only
is available in this paper.
In addition, the input quantization is considered here, which is expressed as [
28]
where
is the input for quantizer,
and
with
being the quantitative degree.
To facilitate the analysis, the input quantization (2) is rewritten as
where
with
being a constant. Since the sign of the control input is invariant during quantization, it follows from (4) that
. To simplify writing, let
, which is also positive.
Control Objectives: The control objective of this paper is to design an adaptive output feedback controller for the switched system (1) with input quantization (2) and state constraints under the arbitrarily switching law such that (1) all signals in the closed-loop system are bounded, (2) the tracking errors can converge to a small neighborhood of origin, (3) all system states do not violate their corresponding constraint conditions.
Assumption 1 [29]. Assumed that the tracking signal and its time derivatives up to the th order are continuous and bounded.
3. Fuzzy Observer Design
A. Description of Fuzzy Logic Systems
The FLSs consisting of If-Then rules is introduced to solve the unknown function problem in the controlled system:
: If is and is and is , is .
When
is the input and
is the output,
and
are fuzzy sets in
, relevant to the fuzzy affiliation functions
and
.
is the fuzzy rule number. Then, the following formula be utilized to describe FLSs
where
refers to the maximum value of
on
.
Let
and denote
and
, then FLSs can be expressed as
.
B. Fuzzy Observer Design
To solve the unavailable system state problem, this section introduces a fuzzy state observer. Firstly, rewrite the considered system (1) as follows
where
Select such that holds, where and are all positive matrice.
The following adaptive fuzzy observer is designed
where
,
is the estimation of
, and
.
is the estimation of
with
being the optimal vector. Let
be the estimated error.
Based on the universal approximation of fuzzy logic systems, the uncertain nonlinear system functions are approximated by the following form:
Define the corresponding error as
where
and
are corresponding error variables, which are bounded. That is to say, there exist constants
and
such that
and
.
Define the observation error as .
Based on (1) and (8), the following results can be obtained
where
,
, and there are two constants
and
such that
and
hold.
4. Adaptive Fuzzy Controller
In this section, the backstepping technique and the barrier Lyapunov function method are used to construct the adaptive fuzzy controller. Firstly, the coordinate transformation is defined as
where
is the reference signal,
denote the transformation errors,
are virtual controllers, which are designed in later steps.
Step 1: According to (1), (8) and (12), the derivative of
is
To solve the state constraint problem, the barrier Lyapunov function
is selected as follows
where
is time-varying function, and
.
is a design parameter.
represents the estimation error between
and
,
stands for the estimate of
with
.
The derivative of
is calculated as
Consider the following facts
where
is a design parameter. Then, according to (15)–(18) into (15), one has
Design the virtual control law as follows
where
is a design parameter,
,
,
and
.
Select the following adaptive law
where
is a parameter.
Substituting (20)–(22) into (19), one gets
where
.
Step
: Based on (1) and (12), one obtains
where
,
Select the barrier Lyapunov function
as
where
represents the design parameter.
Taking the time derivative of
, one has
Applying Young’s inequality, it derives that
where
is a design parameter.
Combing (26)–(32), one gets
For control purposes, the virtual controller is designed as
where
is a design parameter,
,
,
and
,
.
And the adaptive law is chosen as
where
is a design parameter.
Consider that
and substituting (34)–(36) into (33), one gets
where
.
Step
: Based on (1), (3) and (8), one gets
where
,
.
Choose the following barrier Lyapunov function
where
indicates a design parameter.
Differentiating
, one obtains
Consider the following inequalities
where
is a design parameter.
According (40), (41)–(46), one has
Design the adaptive output feedback control law
where
is design parameter,
,
,
and
,
.
Design the adaptive law
where
is a design parameter.
The following inequalities always hold
According to (47)–(50), one obtains
where
.
5. Stability Analysis
To facilitate the description, the following notation is defined
where
.
Theorem 1. Consider the switched uncertain nonlinear system (1) with input quantization (2), unmeasurable states and state contraints, under Assumption 1, the adaptive output feedback controller in (48) is constructed by using the barrier Lyapunov function method and the backstepping technique, which can guarantee that all signals in the closed-loop system are bounded, the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of origin, and none of the states in the system conflict with their corresponding constraints.
Proof. Select the barrier Lyapunov function as follows
According to the above analysis and the definitions in (52) and (53), one has
Integrating (55) over the interval
, one obtains
Based on (54) and (56), one deduces that
Similarly, it can be derived that
From (54) and (56), one easily knows that transformation errors , observer errors and estimation errors are all bounded for the bounded initial values. The tracking error is bounded, this implies that the system output tracks the reference signal. Due to the boundedness of and , then is also bounded. According to the definitions of , , , , and Assumption 1, it can be seen that , , , and are all bounded. Thus, all signals in the closed-loop system are all bounded. Moreover, in the proposed control method, the barrier Lyapunov function is employed such that the system states satisfy the corresponding states. □
Remark 1. It is worth noting that when and are bounded, is also bounded. This can be seen from (4). Then, by observing (5), one can easily know that is bounded, namely , where is a positive constant. Therefore, in the future work, the boundedness case of can be considered.
Remark 2. In this paper, there are many design parameters in the control, which may affect the system performance. In order to ensure that the system has a good performance, the selection of these design parameters are important. and are positive matrices which should be satisfy the Riccati-like equation. From (58), it is easy to know that the value of the tracking error is associated with , and . For lager , and smaller , the tracking error are smaller. At the same time the other signals of the system are smaller. For the other parameters, it is enough to choose them satisfy their corresponding conditions, such as positive.
Remark 3. Compared with the existing results in [
30,
31,
32]
, in which the mode-dependent Lyapunov function is chosen, a common Lyapunov function which is mode-independent is selected in this paper. This because of that the arbitrary switching law is employed here. Actually, in engineering problems, switching signals are often unknown or unable to be determined in advance, so the stability of switched systems under arbitrary switching signals is of special significance. Thus, in this paper, the arbitrary switching law is selected. If a switched system can be stabilized under the arbitrary signal, then the subsequent research (such as robust control, etc.) does not need to pay attention to the impact of switching signals on the system stability. 6. Simulation Example
In this section, a simulation experiment is used to show the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive fuzzy output feedback control approach. Consider the following uncertain nonlinear switched system
where
stands for the switching signal. When
, the external disturbance are chosen as
, and
, the nonlinear functionss are
and
. When
, the external disturbances are
and
, and the nonlinear functions are chosen as
and
.
Moeover, the input quantization is selected as
where
. In addition, to solve the problem of unmeasurable states, the following fuzzy-based observer is designed
and the adaptive virtual controller and the adaptive quantization controller are chosen as
In this simulation, the reference signal is selected as , the associated initial value is set as , , , , , , , . The relevant design parameters are chosen as , .
Figure 1,
Figure 2,
Figure 3,
Figure 4,
Figure 5,
Figure 6 and
Figure 7 show the simulation results.
Figure 1 gives the switching signal.
Figure 2 depicts the trajectories of the system output, its constraint bounds and the tracking signal. From which, one sees that the reference signal can be followed well, and the system output successfully satisfies its constraint condition.
Figure 3 describes the trajectories of state
and its constraint condition. We can find that
is limited within prespecified range.
Figure 4 expresses the curves of the state
and
, and their estimated error
, respectively.
Figure 5 shows the curves of the state
and
, and their estimated error
, respectively. From
Figure 4 and
Figure 5, we can conclude that the system state
and
are well observed.
Figure 6 gives the curves of the adaptive laws
,
, and the input quantization
is presented in
Figure 7.
Figure 6 and
Figure 7 immplies that
,
and
are all bounded. From the simulation results above, it can be concluded that by using the proposed control approach, the control objectives are achieved, thus it is effective.
7. Conclusions
This paper focuses on the input quantization, state constraints and unmeasured system states issues for switched nonlinear systems. For the unmeasured states, a fuzzy-based state observer is developed to estimate them. Then, the barrier Lyapunov function approach is employed to guarantee that the system state does not exceed the corresponding constraint bound. Using the backstepping technique, an adaptive control law is designed that can offset the impact of input quantification. However, due to the application of backstepping method, the problem of computation explosion may be caused. Therefore, how to reduce the amount of computation will be studied in future research.