Decentralized adaptive output feedback design for large-scale nonlinear systems

In this paper, we present a global, decentralized adaptive design procedure for a class of large-scale nonlinear systems, which utilizes only local output feedback. The advocated scheme guarantees robustness to parametric and dynamic uncertainties in the interconnections and also rejects any bounded disturbances entering the system. The systems belonging to this class are those which can be transformed using a global diffeomorphism to the output feedback canonical form, where the interconnections are a function of subsystem outputs only. The uncertainties are assumed to be bounded by an unknown pth-order polynomial in the outputs. The resulting controller maintains global uniform boundedness of all signals of the closed-loop system with good robustness and disturbance rejection properties. The output tracking error is shown to be bounded within a compact set, the size of which can be made arbitrarily small by appropriate choice of the control gains. For the case where the objective is regulation, global asymptotic regulation of all the states of the closed-loop system is achieved.