Observer-based event-triggered adaptive neural control for time-delay nonlinear systems with input saturation and external disturbances

In this article, the issue of adaptive event-triggered tracking control is investigated for time-delay nonlinear systems with input saturation and external disturbances. In the whole process of control design, the radial basis function neural networks are utilized to approximate uncertain nonlinearities. To estimate the unknown states, a neural network-based observer is constructed. Pade approximation method is adopted to eliminate the effect of input delay. A smooth non-affine function is introduced to replace input saturation, and an auxiliary variable is employed to obtain the actual control input. An event-triggered strategy is designed to reduce the utilization of communication and computation resources. Moreover, the command filtering technique is applied to handle the issue of “explosion of complexity” in the conventional backstepping method. The designed controller can assure that all the signals in the closed-loop system are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded. Therefore, the proposed event-triggered neural control scheme can not only save network resources, but also improve the robustness of the system by dealing with input constraints and external disturbances. Finally, two simulation examples are given to verify the availability and feasibility of the designed controller.