IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 11, NO.

6, DECEMBER 2003

783

Adaptive Fuzzy Robust Tracking Controller Design

via Small Gain Approach and Its Application
Yansheng Yang and Junsheng Ren

AbstractA novel adaptive fuzzy robust tracking control

(AFRTC) algorithm is proposed for a class of nonlinear systems
with the uncertain system function and uncertain gain function,
which are all the unstructured (or nonrepeatable) state-dependent
unknown nonlinear functions arising from modeling errors
and external disturbances. The TakagiSugeno type fuzzy logic
systems are used to approximate unknown uncertain functions
and the AFRTC algorithm is designed by use of the input-to-state
stability approach and small gain theorem. The algorithm is
highlighted by three advantages: 1) the uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop adaptive systems in the presence of
nonrepeatable uncertainties can be guaranteed; 2) the possible
controller singularity problem in some of the existing adaptive
control schemes met with feedback linearization techniques
can be removed; and 3) the adaptive mechanism with minimal
learning parameterizations can be obtained. The performance
and limitations of the proposed method are discussed. The uses
of the AFRTC for the tracking control design of a pole-balancing
robot system and a ship autopilot system to maintain the ship on a
predetermined heading are demonstrated through two numerical
examples. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the control
scheme.
Index TermsAdaptive robust tracking, fuzzy control, input-tostate stability (ISS), nonlinear systems, small gain theorem.

I. INTRODUCTION

N RECENT years, interest in designing robust tracking

control for uncertain nonlinear systems has been ever
increasing, and many significant research attentions have been
attracted. Most results addressing this problem are available
in the control literature, e.g., Kokotovic and Arcak [1] and
references therein. And many powerful methodologies for
designing tracking controllers are proposed for uncertain
nonlinear systems. The uncertain nonlinear systems may
be subjected to the following two types of uncertainties:
structured uncertainties (repeatable unknown nonlinearities),
which are linearly parameterized and referred to as parametric
uncertainties, and unstructured uncertainties (nonrepeatable
unknown nonlinearities), which are arising from modeling
errors and external disturbances. To handle the parametric
uncertainties, adaptive control method, which has undergone
rapid developments in the past decade, e.g., [2][7] can be used.

Manuscript received June 28, 2001; revised July 9, 2002 and January 15,
2003. This work was supported in part by the Research Fund for the Doctoral
Program of Higher Education under Grant 20020151005, the Science Foundation under Grant 95-06-02-22, and the Young Investigator Foundation under
Grant 95-05-05-31 of the National Ministry of Communications of China.
The authors are with the Navigation College, Dalian Maritime University
(DMU), Dalian 116026, China (e-mail: ysyang@mail.dlptt.ln.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TFUZZ.2003.819837

As for unstructured uncertainties, if there is a prior knowledge

of the bounded functions, deterministic robust control method,
e.g., [8][12] can be used. Unfortunately, in industrial control
environment, there are some controlled systems with the
unstructured uncertainties where none of prior knowledge of
the bounded functions is available, then the adaptive control
method and the deterministic robust control method can not
be used to design controller for those systems. A solution to
that problem is presented that the neural networks (NNs) are
used to approximate the continuous unstructured uncertain
functions in the systems and Lyapunovs stability theory is
applied in designing adaptive NN controller. Several stable
adaptive NN control approaches are developed by [13][19]
which guarantee uniform ultimate boundedness in the presence
of both unstructured uncertainties and unknown nonlinearities.
As an alternative to NN control approaches, the intensive
research has been carried out on fuzzy control for uncertain
nonlinear systems. The fuzzy systems are used to uniformly
approximate the unstructured uncertain functions in the designed
system by use of the universal approximation properties of
the certain classes of fuzzy systems, which are proposed by
[20] and [21], and a Lyapunov based learning law is used, and
several stable adaptive fuzzy controllers that ensure the stability
of the overall system are developed by [22][26]. Recently, an
adaptive fuzzy-based controller combined with VSS and
control technique has been studied in [27] and [28]. However,
there is a substantial restriction in the aforementioned works:
A lot of parameters are needed to be tuned in the learning
laws when there are many state variables in the designed
system and many rule bases have to be used in the fuzzy
system for approximating the nonlinear uncertain functions,
so that the learning times tend to become unacceptably large
for the systems of higher order and time-consuming process is
unavoidable when the fuzzy logic controllers are implemented.
This problem has been pointed out in [26].
In this paper, we will present a novel approach for that
problem. A new systematic procedure is developed for the
synthesis of stable adaptive fuzzy robust controller for a class
of continuous uncertain systems, and TakagiSugeno (TS)
type fuzzy logic systems [29] are used to approximate the unknown unstructured uncertain functions in the systems and the
adaptive mechanism with minimal learning parameterizations
can be achieved by use of input-to-state stability (ISS) theory
first proposed by Sontag [31] and small gain approach given
in [32]. The outstanding features of the algorithm proposed
in the paper are: i) that only one function is needed to be
approximated by TS fuzzy systems and no matter how many
states in the designed system are investigated and how many

1063-6706/03$17.00 2003 IEEE

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rules in the fuzzy system are used, only two parameters needed
to be adapted on-line, such that the burdensome computation of
the algorithm can be lightened increasingly and it is convenient
to realize this algorithm in engineering; and 2) the possible
controller singularity problem in some of the existing adaptive
control schemes met with feedback linearization techniques
can be avoided.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we will
give the problem formulation, the description of a class of
nonlinear systems and tracking control problem of nonlinear
systems. Section III contains some needed definitions of ISS,
small gain theorem and preliminary results. In Section IV, a
systematic procedure for the synthesis of adaptive fuzzy robust
tracking controller (AFRTC) is developed. In Section V, two
application examples for designing the tracking control for
the pole-balancing robot system and the ship autopilot system
by use of the AFRTC are included and numerical simulation
results are presented. The final section contains conclusions.
II. PROBLEM FORMULATION
A. System Description

where
denotes the operation of taking the maxdenoted by
imum (minimum) eigenvalue. The norm
throughout this paper unless specified explicitly, is nothing but
the vector two-norm over the space defined by stacking the matrix columns into a vector, so that it is compatible with the vector
.
two-norm, i.e.,
The primary goal of this paper is to track a given reference
while keeping the states and control bounded. That
signal
should be small.
is, the output tracking error
is assumed to be bounded and
The given reference signal
, and
has bounded derivatives up to the th order for all
is piecewise continuous.
such that is bounded. SupLet
. The (1) can be transformed into
pose

(2)
In this paper, we present a method for the adaptive robust control design for system (2) in the present of unstructured uncerof the
tainties. Our design objective is to find an AFRTC
form

Consider the th-order uncertain nonlinear systems of the following form:

(1)
and
represent the control input and the
where
output of the system, respectively.
is comprised of the states which are assumed to be available, the
and
integer denotes the dimension of the system.
are unknown smooth uncertain functions and may contain nonis the disturbance, unknown
repeatable nonlinearities.
, where
is an unknown
but bounded, e.g.,
constant.
Throughout this paper, the following assumption is made on
(1).
is known, and there exists a
Assumption 1: The sign of
such that
,
.
constant
is strictly
This assumption implies that smooth function
either positive or negative. From now onwards, without loss of
,
. Asgenerality, we shall assume
being away from zero
sumption 1 is reasonable because
is the controllable conditions of system (1). It should be emis only required for analytical
phasized that the low bound
purposes, its true value is not necessarily known. Some stability
is needed to proceed.
Definition 1: It is said that the solution of (1) is uniformly
ultimately bounded (UUB) if for any , a compact subset of
, and all
, there exists an
and a
such that
for all
.
number
as any suitable vector norm. In this paper,
We represent
and given a
vector norm is Euclidean, i.e.,
, matrix
norm is defined by
matrix

(3)
(4)
is the known fuzzy base functions. In such a way that
where
all the solutions of the closed-loop system (2)(4) are uniformly
ultimately bounded. Furthermore, the output tracking error of
the system can be steered to a small neighborhood of origin.
B. TS Fuzzy Systems
In this section, we briefly describe the structure of fuzzy sysdenote the real numbers,
the real -vectors,
tems. Let
the real
matrices. Let be a compact simply
. With map
, define
to
connected set in
be the function space such that is continuous. A fuzzy system
in order to
can be employed to approximate the function
design the adaptive fuzzy robust control law, thus the configuration of TS type fuzzy logic system called TS fuzzy system
for short [29] and approximation theorem are discussed first as
follows.
Consider a TS fuzzy system to uniformly approximate a
that has a comcontinuous multidimensional function
plicated formulation, where is input vector with independent
. The domain of is
. It follows that the domain of is

In order to construct a fuzzy system, the interval [

subintervals
divided into

] is

On each interval
,
continuous
, are defined
input fuzzy sets, denoted by
is denoted by
to fuzzify . The membership function of
, which can be represented by triangular, trapezoid, generalized bell or Gaussian type and so on.

YANG AND REN: ADAPTIVE FUZZY ROBUST TRACKING CONTROLLER DESIGN

Generally, TS fuzzy system can be constructed by the folfuzzy rules:

lowing

where ,
,
are the unknown
constants. The product fuzzy inference is employed to evaluate
the ANDs in the fuzzy rules. After being defuzzified by a typical
center average defuzzifier, the output of the fuzzy system is

(5)

and
, which is called a
in
fuzzy base function. When the membership function
is denoted by some type of membership function,
is
a known continuous function. So, restructuring (5) as follows:

785

AFRTC scheme, the variants of those notions are reviewed

in the following. First, we begin with the definitions of class
,
and
functions which are standard in the stability
literature; see [41].
Definition 2:
is said of class if it is
A function
. It is of class
continuous, strictly increasing and
if it is of class and is unbounded.
is said of
A function
if, for each
,
is of class , and,
class
,
is strictly decreasing and satisfies
for each
, and is a class
function if and
functions
and
such
only if there exist two class
that

where

Let

,
,

..
.

..
.

..
.

..
.

, then

We consider the following system:

(8)
where is the state and is the input. For this system, we give
the definition of input-to-state stable in the following.
Definition 3: For (8), it is said to be input-to state practically
stable (ISpS) if there exist a function of class , called the
gain, and a function of class
such that, for
nonlinear
, each measurable essentially bounded
any initial condition
defined for all
and a nonnegative constant ,
control
are defined on [0, ) and satisfy
the associated solutions
(9)

the (5) can be easily rewritten as

(6)
,

where
..
.

..
.

..
.

..
.

and

When the fuzzy system is used to approximate the continuous

function, two questions of interest may be asked: whether there
exists a fuzzy system to approximate any nonlinear function to
an arbitrary accuracy? how to determine the parameters in the
fuzzy system if such a fuzzy system does exist. The following
lemma [30] gives a positive answer to the first question.
Lemma 1: Suppose that the input universal of discourse is
a compact set in .Then, for any given real continuous function
on and
, there exists a fuzzy system
in the
form of expression (6) such that

is the truncated function of at and

stands
where
supremum norm.
for the
in (9), the ISpS property collapses to the ISS
When
property introduced in [33].
function
is said to be an ISpS-LyaDefinition 4: A
punov function for (8) if
of class
such that
there exist functions ,
(10)
there exist functions
such that

of class

and a constant

(11)
,
is referred to as an ISSWhen (11) holds with
Lyapunov function.
gain in (9)
Then it holds that one may pick a nonlinear
of the form, which is given in [35]

(7)
(12)
III. MATHEMATICAL PRELIMINARIES
The concept of ISS and ISS-Lyapunov function due to
Stontag [31], [33] and Sontag and Wang [34] have recently
been used in various control problems such as nonlinear
stabilization, robust control and observer designs (see, e.g.,
[35][40]). In order to ease the discussion of the design of

For the purpose of application studied in this paper, we introduce the sequel notion of exp-ISpS Lyapunov function.
function is said to be an exp-ISpS LyaDefinition 5: A
punov function for system (8) if
of class
such that
there exist functions ,
(13)

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 11, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003

left-half complex plane, leads to the exponentially stable dynamics. Then, the (2) can be transformed into
(20)
where

..
.

Fig. 1. Feedback connection of composite systems.

there exist two constants

function
such that

..
.

..
.

..
.

..
.

and a class

(14)
, the function is referred to as
When (14) holds with
an exp-ISS Lyapunov function.
The three previous definitions are equivalent from [34] and
[39]. Namely, the following.
Proposition 1: For any control system (8), the following
properties are equivalent:
i) it is ISpS;
ii) it has an ISpS-Lyapunov function;
iii) it has an exp-ISpS Lyapunov function.
Consider the stability of the closed-loop interconnection of
two systems shown in Fig. 1.
A trivial refinement of the proof of the generalized small
gain theorem given in [32] and [40] yields the following variant
which is suited for our applications here.
Theorem 1: Consider a system in composite feedback form
(cf. Fig. 1)
(15)
(16)
of two ISpS systems. In particular, there exist two constants
,
, and let
and
of class
, and
and
of class
be such that, for each in the
supremum
supremum norm, each
and
norm, each in the
, all the solutions
and
are deeach
fined on [0, ) and satisfy, for almost all
(17)
(18)
Under these conditions
(19)

.
Because is stable, a positivedefinite solution
the Lyapunov equation

of
(21)

is specified by the designer.

always exists and
and
in
For this control problem, if both functions
(20) are available for feedback, the technique of the feedback
linearization can be used to design a well-defined controller,
which is usually given in the form of
for some auxiliary control input with
being nonzero for all time, such that the resulting closed-loop
system can be shown to achieve a satisfactory tracking performance. However, in many practical control systems, plant
uncertainties that contain structured (or parametric) uncertainties and unstructured uncertainties (or nonrepeatable uncerand
may not
tainties) are inevitable. Hence, both
be available directly in the robust control design. Obtaining a
simple control algorithm as before is impossible. Moreover,
if any adaptation scheme is implemented to estimate
and
as
and
respectively, the simple control
algorithm aforementioned can be also used for substituting
and
for
and
, so the extra precaution
for all time. At the
is required to guarantee that
present stage, no effective method is available in the literature. In this paper, we develop a semi-globally stable adaptive
fuzzy robust controller which does not require to estimate
, and therefore avoids the possible
the unknown function
controller singularity problem.
In this paper, the effects due to plant uncertainties and
external disturbances will be considered simultaneously. The
philosophy of our tracking controller design is expected that
TS fuzzy approximators equipped with adaptive algorithms
are introduced first to learn the behaviors of uncertain dyis needed to be
namics. Here, only uncertain function
considered.
is an unknown continuous function, by Lemma 1,
For
with input vector
for some
TS fuzzy system
is proposed here to approximate the uncompact set
where
is a matrix containing the approxicertain term
can be expressed as
mating parameters. Then,

the solution of the composite systems (15) and (16) is ISpS.

IV. DESIGN OF ADAPTIVE FUZZY ROBUST TRACKING CONTROL
Using the pole-placement approach, we consider a term
where
, the s are chosen such that all
lie in the
roots of polynomial

(22)
where is a parameter with respect to approximating accuracy.

YANG AND REN: ADAPTIVE FUZZY ROBUST TRACKING CONTROLLER DESIGN

787

Substituting (22) into (20), we get

(23)
Let

, such that
. It follows that (23) reduces to

and

(24)
In order to design the adaptive fuzzy robust controller easily
by use of the small gain theorem, the following output equation
can be obtained by comparing (24) with (15):
Fig. 2. Feedback connection of fuzzy system.

Then, the feedback equation is given as follows:

Let and be the parameter estimate of
and
, respectively. We propose an adaptive fuzzy robust tracking
controller (AFRTC) as follows:

So, (24) can be rewritten as (15) and (16)

(25)
(26)
Then, the feedback connection using the (25) and (26) can be
implemented using the block diagram shown in Fig. 2.
should be made
From Fig. 2, we observe that the system
to satisfy ISpS condition of the system through designing the
. In (25), is an unknown, and there exist
controller
some parameters with boundedness. According to these properties, an adaptive fuzzy robust tracking control algorithm will
to
be proposed, which not only gives the controller
meet ISpS condition but also the online
make the system
adaptive law for and the other parameters in the (25). For this
purpose, we will discuss it in the following.
Construct an adaptive fuzzy robust tracking controller as
follows:
(27)
denotes a certainty equivalent controller and dewhere
notes a supervisory controller for the disturbance, approximation error and other bounded items. Those will be given in the
following.
Substituting (27) into (25) yields
(28)
Based on the aforementioned condition, we can get

(30)
will be specified by designer, and
is the gain
where
to be chosen later on.
of
The adaptive laws for and are now chosen as
(31)
,
, 2 are the updating rates chosen by
where
,
, 2,
and
are design condesigner, and
stants. Adaptive laws (31) incorporate leakage term based on
a variant of the -modification proposed by Polycarpou and
Ioannou [42], which can prevent parameter drift of the system.
Theorem 2: Consider the system (20), suppose that Ascan be approximated by
sumption 1 is satisfied and the
and
in
TS fuzzy system. If we pick
(21), then the control scheme (30) with adaptive laws (31) is
) of
an AFRTC which can make all the solutions (
the derived closed loop system uniformly ultimately bounded.
and bounds on and , we
Furthermore, given any
can tune our controller parameters such that the output error
satisfies
.
Before proving Theorem 2, the following lemma given in [42]
is reviewed first.
and
Lemma 2: The following inequality holds for any
:
any
(32)

(29)
,
,
,
, and
. denotes
the largest term with unknown constant in all boundedness. In
.
order to design the controller, we can get

where

is a constant that satisfies

, i.e.,
.
The proof of Theorem 2 can be divided into twofold. First, let
and set
as the input of the system
the constant
, to prove the satisfaction of ISpS for the system
by

where

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use of the adaptive fuzzy robust tracking controller, and then to

prove uniform ultimate boundedness of the composite of two
by use of small
systems with the feedback system
gain theorem.
Choose the Lyapunov function as
(33)
,
where
The time derivative of

Let
, by use of Lemma 2, the previous equation can be rewritten as

,
.
along the error trajectory (28) is
(37)
Substituting (35)(37) into (34), such that

(34)
We deal with relative items in (34), substitute (30) into the
relative items shown before, and obtain

(38)
Substituting (31) into (38), we get

(35)

(39)
. If we pick

where
, we get

(36)

By Definition 4, we propose the adaptive fuzzy robust

tracking controller such that the requirement of ISpS for
can be satisfied with the functions
and
system
of class
. By Definition 3 and the (12), we can
of system
as follows:
get a gain function

and substituting (30) into the relative items of (34), we get

where
For system

.
, it is a static system such that we have
(40)

for system
Then, the gain function
According to the requirement
Theorem 1, we can get

Substituting (29) into the aforementioned equation yields

is

.
of small gain

YANG AND REN: ADAPTIVE FUZZY ROBUST TRACKING CONTROLLER DESIGN

Owing to
, the condition of the small gain
, so that it can be
theorem 1 can be satisfied by choosing
proven that the composite closed-loop system is ISpS. Therefore, a direct application of Definition 3 yields that the composite closed-loop system has bounded solutions over [0, ).
-function and a posiMore precisely, there exist a class
such that
tive constant

This, in turn, implies that the tracking error

is bounded
over [0, ). By Proposition 1, there exists an ISpS-Lyapunov
function for the composite closed-loop system. By substituting
(40) into (39), the ISpS-Lyapunov function is satisfied as
follows:

789

Remark 2: Since the function approximation property

of fuzzy systems is only guaranteed within a compact set,
the stability result proposed in this paper is semiglobal in
the sense that, for any compact set, there exists a controller
with sufficiently large number of fuzzy rules such that all
the closed-loop signals are bounded when the initial states
are within this compact set. In practical applications, the
number of fuzzy rules usually can not be chosen too large due
to the possible computation problem. This implies that the
fuzzy system approximation capability is limited, that is, the
approximating accuracy in (22) for the estimated function
will be greater when chosen small number of fuzzy rules.
However, we can choose appropriately the design parameters
, , , ,
to improve both stability and performance of
the closed-loop systems.
V. APPLICATION EXAMPLES

(41)
where
(41), we get

. From

It results that the solutions of composite closed-loop system

are uniformly ultimately bounded, and implies that, for any
, there exists a constant
such that
for all
. The last statement of Theorem
can be made arbitrarily
2 follows readily since
are chosen
small if the design parameters , , , ,
appropriately.
Remark 1: It is interesting to note that most of the available
adaptive fuzzy controllers in the literature are based on feedback
linearization techniques, whose structures are usually taken the
with
and
be the estimates
form
and
, respectively, and be a new control variable.
of
, several modified
To avoid singularity problem when
adaptive methods were provided by [44], [25], and [28]. In this
paper, the adaptive fuzzy robust tracking controller developed
before has the following properties:

where
and
. According to those properties, it is easy
to show that we does not require to estimate the unknown gain
. In such a way we can not only reduce the number
function
and but
of parameters needed to be adapted on-line for
also avoid the possible controller singularity problem usually
met with feedback linearization design when the adaptive fuzzy
control is executed.

Now, we will reveal the control performance of the proposed

AFRTC via application examples. Two examples on designing
tracking controller for pole-balancing robot system and ship autopilot system are given in this section. The former has an unand the latter unknown input
known input gain function
gain constant . We shall find the adaptive fuzzy robust tracking
controllers by following the design procedures given in the previous section. Simulation results will be presented.
A. Pole-Balancing Robot System
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms,
a pole-balancing robot is used for simulation. The Fig. 3 shows
the plant composed of a pole and a cart. The cart moves on the
rail tracks in horizontal direction. The control objective is to balance the pole starting from an arbitrary condition by supplying a
suitable force to the cart. The same case studied has been given
in [43]. The dynamic equations are described by
(42)
where

is the angular position from the equilibrium position

. Suppose that the trajectory planning problem
and
for a weight-lifting operation is considered and this pole-balancing robot system suffers from uncertainties and exogenous
disturbances. The desired angle trajectory is assumed here
. Here,
denotes the mass of the
to be
pendulum, is the mass of the vehicle, is the length of the
pendulum and is the applied force. Here, we use the parame,
,
.
ters for simulations

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 11, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003

Pole-balancing robot system.

Define five fuzzy sets for each ,

with labels
(NL),
(NM),
(ZE),
(PM),
(PL) which are characterized by the following membership functions:
(b)
Fig. 4. Simulation results for proposed AFRTC algorithm in this paper.
(a) Position of pole-balancing robot system (Solid line: actual position, Dashed
line: reference position). (b) Control force.

(43)
.
where
Twenty-five fuzzy rules for the fuzzy system are included in
is approximated
the fuzzy rule bases. Hence, the function
by TS fuzzy system as follows:
(44)

where

..
.

..
.

..
.

can be defined

as (6).
and
, then the solution
We select
of Lyapunov expression (21) is obtained by

Fig. 5. Simulation results for the adaptive parameters when employing

AFRTC algorithm. (a) Adaptive parameter . (b) Adaptive parameter ^.

where

If picking
in (30), we can obtain the adaptive fuzzy
robust tracking controller for pole-balancing robot system as
follows:

(45)

For the convenience of simulation, choose the initial condi,

,
,
. The simulation
tion results are shown in Figs. 4 and 5.

YANG AND REN: ADAPTIVE FUZZY ROBUST TRACKING CONTROLLER DESIGN

791

Before presenting the outstanding advantages of AFRTC

developed in this paper, we will briefly review the control
law proposed in [44] as follows:

(46)
,
and
punov equation and obtain

where

,
,
. Then, we solve the Lya-

(b)

where
if
(which is a constant specified by the
if
, and
.
designer),
Define five fuzzy sets the same as those in (43) for each ,
, twenty-five fuzzy rules for the fuzzy systems
and
, respectively, and singleton fuzzifier, the product inference and the center-average defuzzification are used. Hence, the
and
can be approximated by the fuzzy sysfunctions
and
where
tems

Fig. 6. Simulation results for Control algorithm in (46). (a) Position of

pole-balancing robot system (Solid line: actual position, Dashed line: reference
position). (b) Control force.

In Wang [44], use the following adaptive law to adjust parameter vector ; see (47) at the bottom of the page, where the
is defined as
projection operation

In [44], use the following adaptive law to adjust parameter

vector :
if
if

, , and , please refer to Wang

Here, for the parameters
[44]. The simulation results are shown in Fig. 6.
Fig. 7 shows the simulation results of tracking errors by use
of the proposed AFRTC and the controller given in (46), respectively. From the results, we can see that the control performances
are almost the same. Hence, we can state that the AFRTC satisfies the following advantages that have been described in Secis needed to be approximated
tion IV: only one function
by TS fuzzy systems and no matter how many states in the
system are investigated and how many rules in the fuzzy system
are used, only two parameters are needed to be adapted on-line
in AFRTC. However, for the traditional methodology (e.g., the
control law proposed in [44]), even based on five fuzzy sets for
each state variable and singleton fuzzy model aforementioned,
there are 50 parameters needed to be adapted online for the
and
when the fuzzy logic confuzzy system
troller is implemented. And the traditional methodology can
cause the increase of the number of parameters needed to be

with components

and

and the construction of

is similar to

(48)

if(
if(

) or (
and

and

)
)

(47)

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 11, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003

TABLE I
FUZZY IFTHEN RULES

state such that

spiral test has shown that

. An experiment known as the

can be approximated by
(50)

(b)
Fig. 7. Simulation results of the tracking errors. (a) Proposed AFRTC
algorithm. (b) Control algorithm in (46).

adapted exponentially with that of number of state variables

or fuzzy sets. The computational complexity can be lessened
dramatically and the learning time can be reduced vastly when
using AFRTC developed in this paper. Then AFRTC has the
potential to provide uncomplicated, reliable and easy-to-understand solutions for a large variety of nonlinear control tasks even
for higher order systems.
B. Ship Autopilot System
Many of the present generation of autopilots installed in ships
are designed for the course keeping. They aim at maintaining
the ship on a predetermined course and thus require directional
information. Developments in the last 20 y include variants of
the analogue proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller.
In the recent years, some sophisticated autopilots are proposed
based on advanced control engineering concepts whereby the
gain settings for the proportional, derivative and integral terms
of heading are adjusted automatically to suit the dynamics of
the ship and environmental conditions such as model reference
theoadaptive control [46], self-tuning [47], optimal [48],
ries [49] and adaptive robust fuzzy control [50].
In this paper, the adaptive fuzzy robust tracking controller
proposed above will be used for designing ship autopilot. Before considering the designs of the autopilots, it is of interest to
describe the dynamics of the ship. The mathematical model relating the rudder angle to the heading of the ship is found to
be of the form
(49)
( ) and
(s) are paramewhere
ters which are function of ships constant forward velocity and
is a nonlinear function of . The function
its length.
can be found from the relationship between and in steady

where and are real valued constants.

In normal steering, a ship often makes only small deviations
from its desired direction. The coefficient in the (50) could be
equal to 0 such that a linear model is used as the design model for
designing the autopilot, but in this paper, let both and be not
equal to 0, a nonlinear model (50) is used as the design model
for designing the adaptive fuzzy robust controller as following.
,
and control variable
Let the state variables be
, then the (49) can be rewritten in the statespace form
be
(51)
Without loss of generality, we assume that the function
in the (50) can be defined in the function
which is unknown with a continuous complicated formulation system function, TS fuzzy system can be constructed to approximate the
by the following nine fuzzy IFTHEN rules
function
in Table I.
,
.
In Table I, we select
denotes the fuzzy set Positive, denotes the fuzzy set Zero
and denotes the fuzzy set Negative. They can be characterized by the membership functions as follows

For the previous example, we may use fuzzy sets on the normalized universes of discourse as shown in Fig. 8.
Using the center average defuzzifier and the product inference engine, the fuzzy system is obtained as follows:
(52)

where

..
.

and

..
.

..
.

can be defined

as the (6).
To demonstrate the availability of the proposed scheme, we
take a general cargo ship with the length 126 m and the displacement 11 200 tons as an example for simulation.

YANG AND REN: ADAPTIVE FUZZY ROBUST TRACKING CONTROLLER DESIGN

793

Fig. 8. Fuzzy member ship functions.

The reference model is chosen so as to represent somewhat

realistic performance requirement as
(53)

(b)
Fig. 9. Simulation results for AFRTC algorithm when employed for a cargo
ship. (a) Ship heading [ship heading  (solid line) and reference course 
(dashed line)]. (b) Rudder angle u.

specifies the desired system performance for the

where
.
ship heading
,
and
, then the
When let
solution of Lyapunov expression (21) is obtained by

If the gain is
, the adaptive fuzzy robust tracking
control scheme can be obtained for ship autopilot as follows:

(54)
where

Fig. 10. Simulation results for AFRTC algorithm when employed for a cargo
ship: Tracking error [deg].

which accurately represents the characteristics of the ship is

used as follows:

(55)

Generally, the first step in the controller design procedure is

construction of a truth model of the dynamics of the process
to be controlled. The truth model is a simulation model that includes all the relevant characteristics of the process. The truth
model is too complicated for use in the controller design. Thus,
we need develop a simplified model called the design model that
can be used to design the controller. In this paper, we take the
(29) as the design model. In order to verify the performance of
the ATRFC proposed above by use of simulation, a truth model

where and are the velocity components of the ship and

is the angular rate of yaw angle with respect to time, and ,
,
,
, and
are mass, added mass, inertia moment
and added inertia moment of ship. , are the components of
hydrodynamic force acting on ship in the bodyfixed axis system
and is a moment by the aforementioned forces. The subscripts
denotes the bare hull, is
in the left of the (55) mean that
is wind and wave which produce the exscrew, is rudder,
ternal forces and moments acting on ship. The methods of calculating external forces and moments above have been proposed
in [51].
Simulation results based on the Matlab Simulink package are
shown in Figs. 911.

794

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 11, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003

the system, the TS fuzzy system is made to approximate the

uncertain function, then an AFRTC scheme for ship autopilot
is proposed. Simulation results have shown the effectiveness of
the control scheme.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for
their valuable comments and criticism which have helped to improve this paper.
REFERENCES

(b)
Fig. 11. Simulation results for AFRTC algorithm when employed for a cargo
ship. (a) Adaptive parameter . (b) Adaptive parameter ^.

The controller is trained by applying a signal

, which
changes its value in the interval (0, 30 ) every 300 s. In Fig. 9,
the initial state of the reference signal begins with 20 and the
initial state of the ship heading is 0 . After 100 s, the plant
output and the reference signal are practically indistinguishable,
and it can be seen that the plant output converges rapidly to
the reference signal in Fig. 10. Fig. 11 shows the adaption of
parameters in AFRTC algorithm.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the tracking control problem has been considered for a class of nonlinear uncertain systems with the
unknown system function and unknown gain function, and
TS type fuzzy logic systems have been used to approximate
unknown system function and an AFRTC algorithm, that
can guarantee the closed-loop in the presence of nonrepeatable uncertainties is uniformly ultimately bounded, and the
output tracking error of the system can be steered to a small
, has been achieved by use
neighborhood around
of the ISS and general small-gain approach. The outstanding
features of the algorithm proposed in this paper are that it can
avoid the possible controller singularity problem in some of
existing adaptive control schemes with feedback linearization
techniques and the adaptive mechanism with minimal learning
parameterizations, e.g., no matter how many states in the
system are investigated and how many rules in the fuzzy system
are used, only two parameters, which are a parameter of fuzzy
system and a bounded value including approximation error
and disturbance, are needed to be adapted on-line, so that the
computation load of the algorithm can be reduced and it is
convenient to realize this algorithm in engineering. In order
to make study of efficiency of the algorithm proposed in this
paper, it has been applied to a pole-balancing robot system and
ship autopilot system. In accordance with unknown parameters
of the ship model and the structure of uncertain function of

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Yansheng Yang was born in Jiangsu Province, P. R.

China, in 1957. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.
degrees from the Department of Navigation, Dalian
Maritime University, Dalian, China, in 1982, 1985,
and 2000, respectively.
From 1995 to 1996, he was a Visiting Scholar at
Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan. In 1998, he
became a Professor with the Navigation College at
Dalian Maritime University. His research interest includes robust control and fuzzy control for nonlinear
system and their applications in marine control.

Junsheng Ren was born in Henan province, P.R.

China, in 1976. He received the B.S. degree from the
Navigation College at Dalian Maritime University,
Dalian, in 1999. He is currently working toward the
Ph.D. degree at the same university.
His research interests includes ship motion simulation, robust control theory, and its application to ship
motion.