This article presents a novel event-driven guaranteed cost control method for nonlinear systems subject to actuator faults. For the purpose of handling the problem of actuator faults and obtaining the event-driven approximate optimal guaranteed cost control approach for general nonlinear dynamics, the reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm is utilized to develop a sliding-mode control (SMC) strategy. To begin with, the unknown faults can be estimated by designing a fault observer. Meanwhile, an SMC technique is presented aiming at countering the effect of abrupt faults. In addition, the optimal performance of the equivalent sliding mode dynamics is considered, then an event-driven guaranteed cost control mechanism is implemented by using RL principle. In the control process, a general cost function, which has a simpler structure, is given to reduce the computation complexity. At the same time, a modified cost function is approximated to obtain optimal guaranteed cost control by using a single critic neural network (NN). In addition, a modified weight update law for critic NN is presented to relax the persistence of excitation (PE) condition. Moreover, a newly triggering condition, which is easy to be implemented, is designed, and the critic NN update law makes sure that the system states are stable. Furthermore, in light of the Lyapunov analysis, it is demonstrated that the developed event-driven control method guarantees the uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) property of all the signals. Finally, three simulation results are given to validate the designed control method.

In this article, an integral reinforcement learning (IRL)-based event-triggered guarantee cost control (GCC) approach is proposed for stochastic systems which are modulated by randomly time-varying parameters. First, with the aid of the RL algorithm, the optimal GCC (OGCC) problem is converted into an optimal zero-sum game by solving a modified Hamilton–Jacobin–Isaac (HJI) equation of the auxiliary system. Moreover, in order to address the stochastic zero-sum game, we propose an on-policy IRL-based control approach involved by the multivariate probabilistic collocation method (MPCM), which can accurately predict the mean value of uncertain functions with randomly time-varying parameters. Furthermore, a novel GCC method, which combines the explorized IRL algorithm and MPCM, is designed to relax the restriction of knowing the system dynamics for the class of stochastic systems. On this foundation, for the purpose of reducing computation cost and avoiding the waste of resources, we propose an event-triggered GCC approach involved with explorized IRL and MPCM by utilizing critic-actor-disturbance neural networks (NNs). Meanwhile, the weight vectors of three NNs are updated simultaneously and aperiodically according to the designed triggering condition. The ultimate boundedness (UB) properties of the controlled systems have been proved by means of the Lyapunov theorem. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed GCC algorithms is illustrated via two simulation examples.