Robust tracking and disturbance rejection of bounded rate signals for uncertain/non-linear systems

We consider the problem of designing controllers for non-linear/uncertain systems to achieve tracking of a reference output signal in the presence of a disturbance input signal. When the exogenous signal (combined reference and disturbance) is constant, we require that the tracking error eventually go to zero. When the exogenous signal has a bounded rate, we require that the tracking error be eventually bounded with a bound which only depends on the bound on the magnitude of the rate of the exogenous signal. We also require that the state and control input are bounded when the exogenous signal is bounded. We propose controllers which have a classical PI (proportional integral) structure using state feedback. For linear systems and specific classes of non-linear/uncertain systems we present conditions whose satisfaction guarantees the existence of controllers which achieve the desired behaviour. Satisfaction of these conditions also yields the controller gain matrices.