Singularity-free adaptive control of MIMO discrete-time nonlinear systems with general vector relative degrees

This paper develops a singularity-free adaptive tracking control scheme for a general class of multi-input and multi-output uncertain discrete-time nonlinear systems with non-canonical control gain matrices. The estimation of the control gain matrices, especially in some non-canonical forms, may be singular during parameter adaptation, which leads to the singularity problems of the adaptive control laws. This paper employs the matrix decomposition technique to solve the problem under a linearly parameterized adaptive control framework. The state and output feedback cases are addressed, respectively, to ensure closed-loop stability and asymptotic output tracking. Compared with the existing results, the features of the proposed adaptive control scheme include: (i) the proposed control laws do not involve the high-gain issue commonly encountered in robust control methods; (ii) two different filtered tracking error signals are introduced for the state and output feedback cases, respectively. These filters are crucial to avoid causality contradiction of the adaptive control laws commonly encountered in adaptive control of discrete-time systems; and (iii) a future time signal estimation-based adaptive control law is developed to ensure asymptotic output tracking for the output feedback case without requiring the high-gain observer. Finally, an illustrative example is given to verify the validity of the proposed control scheme.