Single-approximation-based adaptive control of a class of nonlinear time-delay systems

This paper presents a simple adaptive control approach for uncertain strict-feedback nonlinear systems with unknown time-varying delays. All nonlinear functions and time delays in the systems are assumed to be unknown. Compared with the existing works, the contribution of this study is the design of a simple adaptive control law using single function approximator, without the implementation of virtual controllers derived from the backstepping design procedure. Unlike the existing backstepping methods, virtual controllers are only used as intermediate signals for designing the actual control. Therefore, the proposed control scheme is simpler than the existing methods for strict-feedback time-delay systems because the problems of using multiple approximators and calculating virtual controllers are eliminated. In addition, it is shown that all signals in the closed-loop system are uniformly ultimately bounded.