  Adaptive fuzzy control strategies are established to achieve global
prescribed performance with prescribed-time convergence for strict-feedback
systems with mismatched uncertainties and unknown nonlinearities. Firstly, to
quantify the transient and steady performance constraints of the tracking
error, a class of prescribed-time prescribed performance functions are
designed, and a novel error transformation function is introduced to remove the
initial value constraints and solve the singularity problem in existing works.
Secondly, based on dynamic surface control methods, controllers with or without
approximating structures are established to guarantee that the tracking error
achieves prescribed transient performance and converges into a prescribed
bounded set within prescribed time. In particular, the settling time and
initial value of the prescribed performance function are completely independent
of initial conditions of the tracking error and system parameters, which
improves existing results. Moreover, with a novel Lyapunov-like energy
function, not only the differential explosion problem frequently occurring in
backstepping techniques is solved, but the drawback of the semi-global
boundedness of tracking error induced by dynamic surface control can be
overcome. The validity and effectiveness of the main results are verified by
numerical simulations on practical examples.
