Tracking Control for Nonlinear Networked Control Systems

We investigate the tracking control of nonlinear networked control systems (NCS) affected by disturbances. We consider a general scenario in which the network is used to ensure the communication between the controller, the plant and the reference system generating the desired trajectory to be tracked. The communication constraints induce non-vanishing errors (in general) on the feedforward term and the output of the reference system, which affect the convergence of the tracking error. As a consequence, available results on the stabilization of equilibrium points for NCS are not applicable. Therefore, we develop an appropriate hybrid model and we give sufficient conditions on the closed-loop system, the communication protocol and an explicit bound on the maximum allowable transmission interval guaranteeing that the tracking error converges to the origin up to some errors due to both the external disturbances and the aforementioned non-vanishing network-induced errors. The results cover a large class of the so-called uniformly globally asymptotically stable protocols which include the well-known round-robin and try-once-discard protocols. We also introduce a new dynamic protocol suitable for tracking control. Finally, we show that our approach can be used to derive new results for the observer design problem for NCS. It has to be emphasized that the approach is also new for the particular case of sampled-data systems.