Adaptive neural control of nonlinear MIMO systems with unknown time delays

In this paper, a novel adaptive NN control scheme is proposed for a class of uncertain multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear time-delay systems. RBF NNs are used to tackle unknown nonlinear functions, then the adaptive NN tracking controller is constructed by combining Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals and the dynamic surface control (DSC) technique along with the minimal-learning-parameters (MLP) algorithm. The proposed controller guarantees uniform ultimate boundedness (UUB) of all the signals in the closed-loop system, while the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of the origin. An advantage of the proposed control scheme lies in that the number of adaptive parameters for each subsystem is reduced to one, triple problems of “explosion of complexity”, “curse of dimension” and “controller singularity” are solved, respectively. Finally, a numerical simulation is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed scheme.