Coordination of passive systems under quantized measurements

In this paper we investigate a passivity approach to collective coordination and synchronization problems in the presence of quantized measurements and show that coordination tasks can be achieved in a practical sense for a large class of passive systems.Comment: 40 pages, 1 figure, submitted to journal, second round of revie

Synchronization problems for unidirectional feedback coupled nonlinear systems

In this paper we consider three different synchronization problems consisting in designing a nonlinear feedback unidirectional coupling term for two (possibly chaotic) dynamical systems in order to drive the trajectories of one of them, the slave system, to a reference trajectory or to a prescribed neighborhood of the reference trajectory of the second dynamical system: the master system. If the slave system is chaotic then synchronization can be viewed as the control of chaos; namely the coupling term allows to suppress the chaotic motion by driving the chaotic system to a prescribed reference trajectory. Assuming that the entire vector field representing the velocity of the state can be modified, three different methods to define the nonlinear feedback synchronizing controller are proposed: one for each of the treated problems. These methods are based on results from the small parameter perturbation theory of autonomous systems having a limit cycle, from nonsmooth analysis and from the singular perturbation theory respectively. Simulations to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained results are also presented.Comment: To appear in Dyn. Contin. Discrete Impuls. Syst., Ser. A, Math. Ana

Continuous Uniform Finite Time Stabilization of Planar Controllable Systems

Continuous homogeneous controllers are utilized in a full state feedback setting for the uniform finite time stabilization of a perturbed double integrator in the presence of uniformly decaying piecewise continuous disturbances. Semiglobal strong $\mathcal{C}^1$ Lyapunov functions are identified to establish uniform asymptotic stability of the closed-loop planar system. Uniform finite time stability is then proved by extending the homogeneity principle of discontinuous systems to the continuous case with uniformly decaying piecewise continuous nonhomogeneous disturbances. A finite upper bound on the settling time is also computed. The results extend the existing literature on homogeneity and finite time stability by both presenting uniform finite time stabilization and dealing with a broader class of nonhomogeneous disturbances for planar controllable systems while also proposing a new class of homogeneous continuous controllers

Reactive Planar Manipulation with Convex Hybrid MPC

This paper presents a reactive controller for planar manipulation tasks that leverages machine learning to achieve real-time performance. The approach is based on a Model Predictive Control (MPC) formulation, where the goal is to find an optimal sequence of robot motions to achieve a desired object motion. Due to the multiple contact modes associated with frictional interactions, the resulting optimization program suffers from combinatorial complexity when tasked with determining the optimal sequence of modes. To overcome this difficulty, we formulate the search for the optimal mode sequences offline, separately from the search for optimal control inputs online. Using tools from machine learning, this leads to a convex hybrid MPC program that can be solved in real-time. We validate our algorithm on a planar manipulation experimental setup where results show that the convex hybrid MPC formulation with learned modes achieves good closed-loop performance on a trajectory tracking problem

Switching control for incremental stabilization of nonlinear systems via contraction theory

In this paper we present a switching control strategy to incrementally stabilize a class of nonlinear dynamical systems. Exploiting recent results on contraction analysis of switched Filippov systems derived using regularization, sufficient conditions are presented to prove incremental stability of the closed-loop system. Furthermore, based on these sufficient conditions, a design procedure is proposed to design a switched control action that is active only where the open-loop system is not sufficiently incrementally stable in order to reduce the required control effort. The design procedure to either locally or globally incrementally stabilize a dynamical system is then illustrated by means of a representative example.Comment: Accepted to ECC 201