Adaptive control of a class of uncertain nonlinear systems using brain emotional learning and Legendre polynomials

In this paper, an adaptive controller for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems is presented using a combination of Legendre polynomials and brain emotional learning-based intelligent controller (BELBIC). Recently, some versions of BELBIC have been presented with the aim of satisfying the universal approximation property using Gaussian basis function. However, the size of regressor vector is too large that imposes a heavy computational load to the processor. The novelty of this paper is presenting a new version of BELBIC with less computational burden using Legendre polynomials. Moreover, there are very few tuning parameters in Legendre polynomials. Another contribution of this paper is editing the stability analysis presented in recent related works. Due to the intrinsic non-differentiability of the adaptation rules of BELBIC, the second time derivative of Lyapunov function is undefined and thus, the Barbalat’s lemma cannot be applied to verify the asymptotic convergence of the error function. Therefore, bounded-input-bounded-output (BIBO) stability can only be claimed for this controller. Simulation results on different case studies show that Legendre polynomials can improve the universal approximation property of BELBIC with less tuning parameters. Moreover, in the absence of the robust control term in the control law, the performance Legendre polynomials will not deteriorate, while the performance degrade in Gaussian basis function is quite considerable.