Practically Finite-Time Control for Nonlinear Systems With Mismatching Conditions and Application to a Robot System

This paper is concerned with the practically finite-time (PFT) control problem for a class of more general nonlinear systems subject to mismatching time-varying disturbances. Without any extra assumptions on system nonlinearities, a composite controller is developed by introducing a disturbance observer and finite-time control technique. Based on the designed controller and Lyapunov stability theory, the PFT stability of the closed-loop system is strictly verified and proven to be a better convergence performance. Furthermore, as a byproduct of the proposed design method, the disturbance observer-based PFT control for high-order nonlinear systems is also shown to be possible. To the best of the authors' knowledge, it is the first PFT control result for high-order nonlinear systems with external disturbances. Finally, an application example of a single-link robot system with disturbances and a numerical example are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, respectively.