In this article, we investigate the global regulation problem for a class of feedforward nonlinear systems. Notably, the systems under consideration allow unknown input-output-dependent nonlinear growth rates, which has not been considered in existing works. A novel logic-based switching (LBS) gain approach is proposed to counteract the system uncertainties and nonlinearities. The key idea of the proposed approach is that whenever the Lyapunov function does not decrease as desired, the switching mechanism is activated so that a new gain is adopted. Furthermore, a tanh-type speed-regulation function is embedded into the switching mechanism for the first time to improve the convergence speed and transient performance. Then, a switching adaptive output feedback (SAOF) controller, which is of concise form and low complexity, is proposed based on the developed switching mechanism. It is shown that the objective of global regulation is achieved with faster convergence speed and better transient performance under the proposed controller. Moreover, it is also shown that the proposed control approach can be extended with the enhanced switching mechanism to deal with feedforward nonlinear systems with external disturbances. Finally, numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our approach in comparison with the existing approaches.

This article proposes a dynamic gain approach for investigating the leader-follower consensus problem of nonlinear multiagent systems with both distributed delays and discrete delays. It is assumed that each agent is in the strict-feedback form and satisfies the Lipschitz condition with an unknown constant. A novel dynamic gain observer is first constructed for each follower by only utilizing the output information of the follower and its neighbors. By introducing an observer, a distributed output-feedback control protocol is designed for each follower agent under a directed communication topology. It is proved by the Lyapunov-Razumikhin theorem that the consensus of the multiagent system is achieved with the proposed consensus protocol. Different from the existing results, the dynamic gain is constructed for each follower to propose the consensus protocol, without resorting to the celebrated backstepping technique. Moreover, the time-varying gain is designed in a uniform framework. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is illustrated by a simulation example.

This article is concerned with the event-triggered output feedback control problem for a class of switched nonlinear strict-feedback systems subject to asymmetric input saturation. The nonlinear terms are assumed to be bounded by a continuous function of the output multiplied by unmeasured states. The hyperbolic tangent function is employed to process the error caused by the event-triggered scheme, and an indicator function of the saturation degree is used to analyze the influence generated by the asymmetric input saturation. By adopting the common Lyapunov function method and the dynamic gain control design approach, a new design procedure based on a reduced-order observer is proposed to construct an output feedback controller. It is proved by the Lyapunov analysis that the proposed event-triggered control scheme can ensure that all the signals of the closed-loop system are globally bounded. Furthermore, the output can be converged to a bounded region around the origin, and this region can be tuned to be small by adjusting the design parameters. Different from typical existing results on the switched nonlinear strict-feedback systems, the celebrated backstepping method is not employed in this article. The continuous stirred tank reactor is finally used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.