In this paper, we investigate the problem of output feedback control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with event-triggered input. The considered system contains not only unknown system parameters, but also general nonlinear functions which are not required to be globally Lipschitz, in contrast to most of the existing results in the area. Besides providing two different event-triggered strategies without input-to-state stable (ISS) assumption with respect to the measurement errors, we propose a new way to encode and decode the event-triggered control signals to further decrease the communication rate. With our newly-proposed encoding-decoding mechanism, each time when the triggering event is violated, only one-bit signal, either 1 or 0, is rendered to transmit through the communication channel between the controller and actuator. Clearly, this signal transmission mechanism is more effective and consumes less channel bandwidth. Through Lyapunov analyses, it is proved that the boundedness of all the signals is ensured and the output signal can be regulated to a compact set around zero which is adjustable.

Although rich collection of research results on event-triggered control exist, no effort has ever been made in integrating state/output triggering and controller triggering simultaneously with backstepping control design. The primary objective of this article is, by using intermittent output signal only, to build a backstepping adaptive event-triggered feedback control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems. To do so, we need to tackle three technical obstacles. First, the nature of the event triggering makes the transmitted output signal discontinuous, rendering the regular recursive backstepping design method inapplicable as the repetitive differentiation of virtual control signals is literally undefined. Second, the effects arisen from the event-triggering action must be properly accommodated, but the current compensating method only works for systems in normal form, thus a new method needs to be developed in order to handle nonnormal form systems. Third, as only intermittent output signal is available, and at the same time, the impacts of certain terms containing unknown parameters (arising from event triggering) need to be compensated, it is rather challenging to design a suitable state observer. To circumvent these difficulties, we employ the dynamic filtering technique to avoid the differentiation of virtual control signals in the backstepping design, construct a new compensation scheme to deal with the effects of output triggering, and build a new form of state observer to facilitate the development of output feedback control. It is shown that, with the derived adaptive backstepping output-triggered control, all the closed-loop signals are ensured bounded and the transient system performance in the mean square error sense can be adjusted by appropriately adjusting design parameters. The benefits and effectiveness of the proposed scheme are also validated by numerical simulation.

Direct current (DC) microgrid is being increasingly investigated in modern power grid. An important issue in DC microgrid operation is to ensure proper current sharing among converters. While this has been addressed through droop control, the resulting voltage deviation in DC bus has to be compensated. To solve this problem, a new distributed secondary control scheme is presented in this paper for both current sharing and voltage restoration. A key part of the presented scheme is the integration of a new parameter ‘virtual voltage drop’ defined from droop gain and line resistance. Since the DC bus voltage is not required as a feedback signal, the proposed secondary control is simple and easy to design and implement. In addition, as the proposed scheme has no requirement for the loads, it can handle both resistance loads and constant power loads (CPLs). Simulations as well as experimental studies are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

It is still an open problem to synthesize control with input and output quantizations for nonlinear systems subject to mismatched parametric uncertainties via backstepping design. This is because 1) the output becomes discontinuous and nondifferentiable after quantization, making the conventional recursive backstepping design method unsuitable as the differentiation of the virtual control signals does not exist, while the existing backstepping-based quantized control method is only applicable to systems modeled in normal form or systems without mismatched uncertainties; 2) it is difficult to deal with the impacts of errors caused by output quantization when the virtual control laws contain time-varying estimates of unknown parameters; and 3) since only the quantized output signal is available, the effects of certain items related to unknown parameters in currently available observers become difficult to be explicitly addressed. In this article, we present a solution to this problem by employing a dynamic filtering technique to avoid differentiating virtual control signals in backstepping design, using the parameter projection technique to design the parameter estimator and proposing a new form of state observer to facilitate the development of output feedback control. It is shown that, with the derived adaptive backstepping control involving both input and output quantizations, all the closed-loop signals are ensured bounded and the control performance in terms of the mean square error is adjustable through properly choosing certain design parameters. The benefits and effectiveness of the proposed scheme are also validated by numerical simulation.

The distributed control of DC microgrid is becoming increasingly important in modern power systems. One important control objective is to ensure DC bus voltage stability and proper current sharing with a reduced communication burden. This paper presents a new event-triggered distributed secondary control strategy for single-bus DC microgrid. Through this strategy, both current sharing and bus voltage regulation can be guaranteed. Moreover, through the event-triggering mechanism, each converter can decide locally when to transmit signals to its neighbours. In this way, the communication burden among converters is significantly reduced. Compared to existing results, the proposed strategy also enables various types of loads, including both linear and nonlinear loads, to be connected to the DC microgrid. Simulation and experiment results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Modern power grid is increasingly integrated with battery energy storage systems (BESSs). This paper deals with the problem of state-of-charge (SoC) balance control for multiple distributed BESSs in smart grid. The BESSs are expected to work cooperatively to not only fulfil the overall power requirement but also meet the constraints of the same relative SoC variation rate. To achieve this objective, a distributed SoC balance control approach is presented with event-triggered signal transmissions. It is designed with the dynamic average consensus (DAC) mechanism for parameter estimations. The DAC enables distributed control of each BESS through communicating with its neighboring BESSs. Different from traditional periodic signal transmission, the event-triggered signal transmission embedded in our approach allows each BESS to transmit signal to its neighboring BESSs only when needed, thus reducing the communication traffic. Theoretical lower bounds are established for consecutive interevent intervals such that the Zeno behavior is excluded. Case studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented approach.