Design of distributed preview tracking controller for nonlinear interconnected systems with time-delay

The focus of this article is to design a distributed preview tracking controller for a class of nonlinear interconnected systems with time-delay. By constructing the error systems with the information of previewable reference signal, and defining an H-8 performance index, the original preview tracking problem is converted into the H-8 control problem of the error system. Based on the relationship between the interconnection matrices and the input matrices, a distributed controller using not only the local state vector information but also the interconnection term information is designed for the error systems. Under this controller, the closed-loop error system is decoupled. With the help of Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, the sufficient conditions, the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop error system with H-8 disturbance attenuation level, are established. The distributed preview tracking controller, which is composed of state feedback, integrator, and preview feedforward, is acquired by integrating the controller of the error system. The proposed preview controller is applied to the chemical reactor recycles system and double-parallel inverted pendulum system. The simulation verify that this controller is very effective in improving the tracking performance.