Observer‐based adaptive controller for a class of fractional‐order uncertain systems subject to unknown input and output quantizers and input nonlinearities

This work addresses design of an adaptive controller for nonlinear fractional‐order (FO) systems in the strict‐feedback form. The system is subject to unknown dynamics, unavailable state variables, quantized input and output, and input nonlinearity. The fuzzy logic system (FLS) is used to estimate the unknown dynamics, and instead of updating all the regressor weights, only the maximum of their norms is updated, which significantly reduces the computational load. Limitations imposed by data transmission bandwidth have been addressed by incorporating sector‐bounded quantizers, which include both logarithmic and hysteresis quantizers at the system input and output, and their errors have been considered in the controller design. It is assumed that system states are not measured. To estimate the system states, a linear observer has been used. Because of output quantization, the continuous output signal is not available, and therefore the observer has been designed based on the quantized output signal. In addition, the constraints of input nonlinearities, including symmetric and asymmetric saturation, backlash, hysteresis, and dead‐zone, have been considered in the controller design. Input nonlinearity and input quantization have been investigated simultaneously, which makes the analysis more challenging. Moreover, it is assumed that the type of input nonlinearity and its characteristics are not known, which makes the controller design more difficult. These problems have been resolved by using two novel adaptive laws. The adaptive backstepping method and the direct Lyapunov stability analysis have been used to construct the controller, and a nonlinear modified FO filter is used to avoid the explosion of complexity occurring in the traditional backstepping technique. Stability of the closed loop system has been established, and it has been shown that the tracking and state estimation errors converge to a small neighborhood of the origin. Finally, the proposed controller performance has been demonstrated via three simulation examples.