When dealing with nonlinear systems, regular notions of stability are not enough to ensure an appropriate behavior when dealing with problems such as tracking, synchronization and observer design. Incremental stability has been proposed as a tool to deal with such problems and ensure that the system presents relevant qualitative behavior. However, as it is often the case with nonlinear systems, the complexity of the analysis leads engineers to search for relaxations, which introduce conservatism. We focus on the incremental stability of a specific class of systems, namely piecewise-affine systems, which could provide a valuable tool for approaching the incremental stability of more general dynamical systems.
Piecewise-affine systems have a partitioned state space, in each region of which the dynamics are governed by an affine differential equation. They can represent systems containing piecewise-affine nonlinearities, as well as serve as approximations of more general nonlinear systems. More importantly, their description is relatively close to that of linear systems, allowing us to obtain analysis conditions expressed as linear matrix inequalities that can be efficiently handled numerically by existing solvers. In the first part of this memoir, we review the literature on the analysis of piecewise-affine systems using Lyapunov and dissipativity techniques. We then propose new conditions for the analysis of incremental L2-gain and incremental asymptotic stability of piecewise-affine systems expressed as linear matrix inequalities. These conditions are shown to be less conservative than previous results and illustrated through numerical examples. In the second part, we consider the case of uncertain piecewise-affine systems represented as the interconnection between a nominal system and a structured uncertainty block. Using graph separation theory, we propose conditions that extend the framework of integral quadratic constraints to consider the case when the nominal system is piecewise affine, both in the non-incremental and incremental cases. Through dissipativity theory, these conditions are then expressed as linear matrix inequalities.
Finally, the third part of this memoir is devoted to the analysis of uncertain Lur’e-type nonlinear systems. We develop a new approximation technique allowing to equivalently rewrite such systems as uncertain piecewise-affine systems connected with the approximation error. The proposed approach ensures that the approximation error is Lipschitz continuous with a guaranteed pre-specified upper bound on the Lipschitz constant. This enables us to use the aforementioned techniques to analyze more general classes of nonlinear systems.
salle: AR1 (premier étage du bâtiment D, ONERA à Toulouse).
Lien visio : https://rdv.onera.fr/seminaireDTIS