Stabilization of a class of nonlinear uncertain ordinary differential equation by parabolic partial differential equation controller

Summary This article is concerned with stabilization for a class of uncertain nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE) with dynamic controller governed by linear 1− d heat partial differential equation (PDE). The control input acts at the one boundary of the heat's controller domain and the second boundary injects a Dirichlet term in ODE plant. The main contribution of this article is the use of the recent infinite‐dimensional backstepping design for state feedback stabilization design of coupled PDE‐ODE systems, to stabilize exponentially the nonlinear uncertain systems, under the restrictions that (a) the right‐hand side of the ODE equation has the classical particular form: linear controllable part with an additive nonlinear uncertain function satisfying lower triangular linear growth condition, and (b) the length of the PDE domain has to be restricted. We solve the stabilization problem despite the fact that all known backstepping transformation in the literature cannot decouple the PDE and the ODE subsystems. Such difficulty is due to the presence of a nonlinear uncertain term in the ODE system. This is done by introducing a new globally exponentially stable target system for which the PDE and ODE subsystems are strongly coupled. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the design procedure of the proposed method.