Safe tracking control based on a secure boundary protection method for nonlinear systems with unknown initial tracking condition

Aiming to the sudden change of the system actual output constraint, a novel safe tracking control strategy is investigated for a class of non-strict feedback nonlinear systems with unknown initial tracking condition in this paper. A secure boundary protection method (SBPM) based on prescribed performance and a new prescribed finite-time performance function (PFTPF) are proposed. The SBPM can automatically construct two adjustable secure boundaries, so that the system output meets both the control performance prescribed by the PFTPF and the secure boundary constraint. In order to solve the problem of the excessive control input jitter caused by the sudden change of output constraint, a bidirectional filtering smoothing mechanism (BFSM) is proposed. The proposed SBPM can effectively ensure the safe tracking control of the system with unknown initial tracking condition when the actual output constraint changes suddenly, and ensure that the system has the prescribed finite-time control performance given by the PFTPF. Differently from the existing works, the system output will be strictly constrained into the actual output constraint without the prediction for the system output value. Finally, the effectiveness of this proposed method is verified by simulations.