Adaptive prescribed performance control of nonlinear systems with unknown dead zone

SUMMARY An alternative adaptive control with prescribed performance is proposed to address the output tracking of nonlinear systems with a nonlinear dead zone input. An appropriate function that characterizes the convergence rate, maximum overshoot, and steady‐state error is adopted and incorporated into an output error transformation, and thus the stabilization of the transformed system is sufficient to achieve original tracking control with prescribed performance. The nonlinear dead zone is represented as a time‐varying system and Nussbaum‐type functions are utilized to deal with the unknown control gain dynamics. A novel high‐order neural network with a scalar adaptive weight is developed to approximate unknown nonlinearities, thus the computational costs can be diminished dramatically. Some restrictive assumptions on the system dynamics and the dead‐zone are circumvented. Simulations are included to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.