Practical tracking control for a class of uncertain MIMO nonlinear systems with unmatched disturbances

This paper studies the output tracking control problem for a class of uncertain MIMO nonlinear systems. The motivation comes from how to deal with unknown coupling system dynamics between subsystems and achieve the desired tracking when the system has parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. The difficulty is to guarantee that tracking errors enter an arbitrarily prescribed neighbourhood within a finite time. Based on the construction of a time-varying dynamic gain associated with tracking errors and the effective manipulation of nonlinear parametrization, a novel robust feedback controller is built up to ensure the boundedness of all closed-loop signals and the convergence of tracking errors to a small neighborhood approaching the origin in a finite time. Finally, the feasibility of control strategy is verified by numerical and practical examples.