In this paper, a novel data-driven robust approximate optimal tracking control scheme is proposed for unknown general nonlinear systems by using the adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) method. In the design of the controller, only available input-output data is required instead of known system dynamics. A data-driven model is established by a recurrent neural network (NN) to reconstruct the unknown system dynamics using available input-output data. By adding a novel adjustable term related to the modeling error, the resultant modeling error is first guaranteed to converge to zero. Then, based on the obtained data-driven model, the ADP method is utilized to design the approximate optimal tracking controller, which consists of the steady-state controller and the optimal feedback controller. Further, a robustifying term is developed to compensate for the NN approximation errors introduced by implementing the ADP method. Based on Lyapunov approach, stability analysis of the closed-loop system is performed to show that the proposed controller guarantees the system state asymptotically tracking the desired trajectory. Additionally, the obtained control input is proven to be close to the optimal control input within a small bound. Finally, two numerical examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

In this paper, the near-optimal control problem for a class of nonlinear discrete-time systems with control constraints is solved by iterative adaptive dynamic programming algorithm. First, a novel nonquadratic performance functional is introduced to overcome the control constraints, and then an iterative adaptive dynamic programming algorithm is developed to solve the optimal feedback control problem of the original constrained system with convergence analysis. In the present control scheme, there are three neural networks used as parametric structures for facilitating the implementation of the iterative algorithm. Two examples are given to demonstrate the convergence and feasibility of the proposed optimal control scheme.

This article addresses the adaptive event-triggered neural control problem for nonaffine pure-feedback nonlinear multiagent systems with dynamic disturbance, unmodeled dynamics, and dead-zone input. Radial basis function neural networks are applied to approximate the unknown nonlinear function. A dynamic signal is constructed to deal with the design difficulties in the unmodeled dynamics. Moreover, to reduce the communication burden, we propose an event-triggered strategy with a varying threshold. Based on the Lyapunov function method and adaptive neural control approach, a novel event-triggered control protocol is constructed, which realizes that the outputs of all followers converge to a neighborhood of the leader's output and ensures that all signals are bounded in the closed-loop system. An illustrative simulation example is applied to verify the usefulness of the proposed algorithms.

In this paper, we aim to solve the infinite-time optimal tracking control problem for a class of discrete-time nonlinear systems using the greedy heuristic dynamic programming (HDP) iteration algorithm. A new type of performance index is defined because the existing performance indexes are very difficult in solving this kind of tracking problem, if not impossible. Via system transformation, the optimal tracking problem is transformed into an optimal regulation problem, and then, the greedy HDP iteration algorithm is introduced to deal with the regulation problem with rigorous convergence analysis. Three neural networks are used to approximate the performance index, compute the optimal control policy, and model the nonlinear system for facilitating the implementation of the greedy HDP iteration algorithm. An example is given to demonstrate the validity of the proposed optimal tracking control scheme.

In this paper, a near-optimal control scheme is proposed to solve the nonzero-sum differential games of continuous-time nonlinear systems. The single-network adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) is utilized to obtain the optimal control policies which make the cost functions reach the Nash equilibrium of nonzero-sum differential games, where only one critic network is used for each player instead of the action-critic dual network used in a typical ADP architecture. Furthermore, the novel weight tuning laws for critic neural networks are proposed, which not only ensure the Nash equilibrium to be reached but also guarantee the system to be stable. No initial stabilizing control policy is required for each player. Moreover, Lyapunov theory is utilized to demonstrate the uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system. Finally, a simulation example is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed near-optimal control scheme.

In this paper, a weighting-delay-based method is developed for the study of the stability problem of a class of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with time-varying delay. Different from previous results, the delay interval [0, d(t)] is divided into some variable subintervals by employing weighting delays. Thus, new delay-dependent stability criteria for RNNs with time-varying delay are derived by applying this weighting-delay method, which are less conservative than previous results. The proposed stability criteria depend on the positions of weighting delays in the interval [0, d(t)], which can be denoted by the weighting-delay parameters. Different weighting-delay parameters lead to different stability margins for a given system. Thus, a solution based on optimization methods is further given to calculate the optimal weighting-delay parameters. Several examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed criteria.