Systematic Design of Adaptive Controllers for Feedback Linearizable Systems

A systematic procedure is developed for the design of new adaptive regulation and trackdng schemes for a class of feedback linearizable nonlinear systems. The coordinate-free geometric conditions, which characterize this class of systems, neither restrict the location of the unknown parameters, nor constrain the growth of the nonlinearities. Instead, they require that the nonlinear system be transformable into the so-called pure-feedback form. When this form is "strict", the proposed scheme guarantees global regulation and tracking properties, and substantially enlarges the class of nonlinear systems with unknown parameters for which global stabilization can be achieved. The main results of this paper use simple analytical tools, familiar to most control engineers.