  The fundamental problem of stabilizing a general non-affine continuous-time
nonlinear system is investigated via piecewise affine linear models (PALMs) in
this paper. A novel integral sliding-mode parallel control (ISMPC) approach is
developed, where an uncertain piecewise affine system (PWA) is constructed to
model a non-affine continuous-time nonlinear system equivalently on a compact
region containing the origin. A piecewise integral sliding-mode parallel
controller is designed to globally stabilize the uncertain PWA and,
consequently, to semi-globally stabilize the original nonlinear system. The
proposed scheme enjoys two favorable features: i) some restrictions on the
system input channel are eliminated, thus the developed method is more relaxed
compared with the published approaches; and ii) it is convenient to be used to
deal with both matched and unmatched uncertainties of the system. Moreover, we
provide discussions about the universality analysis of the developed control
strategy for two kinds of typical nonlinear systems. Simulation results from
two numerical examples further demonstrate the performance of the developed
control approach.
