In the early 1950’s, using their experimental data, Hodgkin and Huxley constructed the sodium and potassium conductance feedback controllers for their mathematical model of the flow of electric current through the surface membrane of a giant nerve fibre. In this paper, we re-formulate the construction as a problem of exponential tracking and disturbance rejection and then re-construct new conductance feedforward controllers in the more complicated case of a propagated action potential. The dynamics of the potential is governed by the Hodgkin-Huxley’s partial differential equation (PDE) model. The problem is solved for any current disturbances and potential references and conductance coefficient feedforward controllers are designed by using the method of variable transform. It is proved that, under the designed feedforward controllers, the potential tracks exponentially a desired potential reference uniformly on an interval of one unit and the reference satisfies the controlled PDE model except an initial condition. A numerical example shows that the simulated action potential and sodium and potassium conductances are close to the experimental observations.

In solving the problem of exponential tracking and disturbance rejection, it has been long always assumed that the reference to be tracked and the disturbance to be rejected are generated by an exosystem such as a finite dimensional system with pure imaginary eigenvalues. The aim of this note is to show that this assumption can be removed. For any nonlinear control system subject to a general disturbance, it can be split into a linear exponentially-stable system and a dynamical regulator system. If the dynamical regulator system has a solution, then there exists a feedback and feedforward controller such that an output of the control system exponentially tracks a desired general reference. The result is applied to the blood glucose regulation system.