Adaptive stabilizing control design via switching for high-order uncertain nonlinear systems

This paper considers the global adaptive stabilizing control design for a class of high-order uncertain nonlinear systems with unknown control coefficients. Different from the existing literature in which the problem is solved by designing the traditional adaptive controller, in this paper, by skillfully applying adding a power integrator and adaptive control methods via switching, a new adaptive controller via switching is successfully proposed, which is simple and easy to implement. The involved controller guarantees that all states of the closed-loop system are globally bounded and furthermore ultimately converge to zero. It is worth mentioning that, compared with the existing literature on adaptive control via switching, the higher system orders and the unknown control coefficients make the nonlinear systems in this paper possess stronger nonlinearities and more serious uncertainties/unknowns.