“…Since the openloop error expression for the mass in (13) does not have an actual control input, a virtual control input, is introduced by adding and subtracting to (13) as (16) To facilitate the subsequent backstepping-based design, the virtual control input to the unactuated mass-spring-damper system is designed as (17) In (17), is a constant positive control gain, and and are the estimates of the ideal weights, which are updated based on the subsequent stability analysis as (18) where , are constant, positive definite, symmetric gain matrices, and denotes a projection algorithm 1 utilized to guarantee that the weight estimates and remain bounded [27], [28]. The estimates for the NN weights in (18) are generated online (there is no offline learning phase).…”