Data-driven nonlinear output regulation via data-enforced incremental passivity

Abstract: This work proposes a data-driven regulator design that drives the output of a nonlinear system asymptotically to a time-varying reference and rejects time-varying disturbances. The key idea is to design a data-driven feedback controller such that the closed-loop system is incrementally passive with respect to the regulation error and a virtual input. By carefully designing the virtual input, we solve the data-driven nonlinear output regulation problem where the reference and disturbances are generated by a linear exosystem. The designed regulator is composed of an internal model and a passivation feedback controller characterized by a set of data-dependent linear matrix inequalities. The proposed data-driven method is also applied to stabilizing the non-zero equilibrium of a class of nonlinear systems with unknown equilibrium input. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed designs.