In this paper, the decentralized tracking control problem of nonlinear large-scale systems with immeasurable states and unknown nonlinearities in each subsystem and their interconnections subject to input delays is proposed. Based on the universal approximation properties of fuzzy systems, a fuzzy observer is designed to estimate the inaccessible states of the system. Subsequently, by defining the appropriate change of coordinates and employing the backstepping technique, an adaptive fuzzy backstepping output feedback control scheme is proposed for nonlinear interconnected systems subject to input delays. Owing to the problem of so-called explosion of complexity that inherently arises in the design procedures of the traditional backstepping technique, an adaptive fuzzy dynamic surface output feedback control approach is also presented for this class of large-scale systems. Moreover, it is shown that the two proposed adaptive decentralized fuzzy observer-based control approaches ensure all the signals of the closed loop system uniformly ultimately bounded and the norms of the tracking errors as well as the norms of the observation errors can converge to small desired values by proper selection of the design parameters. Finally, the theoretic achievements are carried out on the chemical reactor recycle system to illustrate and compare the effectiveness of the two proposed approaches. …
