Decentralized Intermittent Feedback Adaptive Control of Non-Triangular Nonlinear Time-Varying Systems

This note investigates the decentralized stabilization problem for a class of interconnected systems in the presence of non-triangular structural uncertainties and time-varying parameters, where each subsystem exchanges information only with its neighbors and only intermittent (rather than continuous) states and input are to be utilized. Thus far to the best of authors' knowledge, no solution exists priori to this work, despite its high prevalence in practice. Two globally decentralized adaptive control schemes are presented based on the backstepping technique: the first one is developed in a continuous fashion by combining the philosophy of the modified congelation of variables-based approach with the special treatment of non-triangular structural uncertainties, which avoids the derivative of time-varying parameters and eliminates the limitation of the triangular condition, thus largely broadens the scope of application. By making use of the important property that the partial derivatives of the constructed virtual controllers in each subsystem are all constants, the second scheme is developed through directly replacing the states in the preceding scheme with the triggered ones. Consequently, the non-differentiability issue of the virtual controllers stemming from intermittent state feedback is completely obviated. The internal signals under both schemes are rigorously shown to be globally uniformly bounded with the aid of several novel lemmas, while the stabilization performance can be enhanced by appropriately adjusting design parameters. Moreover, the interevent intervals are ensured to be lower bounded by a positive constant. Finally, numerical simulation verifies the benefits and efficiency of the proposed method.