It is proposed to conduct research on the design of robust output feedback control of a class of nonlinear systems. The class of systems to be considered is the class of input-output linearizable systems, which arise in many applications such as robotic manipulators, aircraft control, and electric machines. The design procedure starts with the design of a robust state feedback control followed by the design of a robust observer to recover robustness achieved with state feedback. The performance of such observers are usually hindered by difficulties due to measurement noise and excessively large transient response. A recent result by the principal investigator has shown that, for the special case of fully linearizable systems, the undesirable transient behavior can be eliminated by designing the feedback control to be globally bounded. This proposal aims at developing a comprehensive theory for the design of globally bounded output feedback controllers. Problems to be investigated include tracking, disturbance rejection servomechanisms, robustness, comparison of various state estimation schemes, and study the effect of measurement noise.
