Universal adaptive control of nonlinear systems with unknown growth rate by output feedback

This paper investigates the problem of global stabilization by output feedback, for a family of uncertain nonlinear systems without zero dynamics. These nonlinear systems are dominated by a triangular system satisfying linear growth condition. In contrast to the previous work in the literature, the growth rate here is a positive constant but not known a priori, and therefore the problem becomes more involved and difficult. Using the idea of universal control combined with the output feedback design method developed in Qian and Lin (2002, 2003), we explicitly construct a universal-type adaptive output feedback controller which globally regulates all the states of the uncertain systems without knowing the growth rate.