New advances in H∞ control and filtering for nonlinear systems

The main objective of this special issue is to summarise recent advances in H∞ control and filtering for nonlinear systems, including time-delay, hybrid and stochastic systems. The published papers provide new ideas and approaches, clearly indicating the advances made in problem statements, methodologies or applications with respect to the existing results. The special issue also includes papers focusing on advanced and non-traditional methods and presenting considerable novelties in theoretical background or experimental setup. Some papers present applications to newly emerging fields, such as network-based control and estimation

Variable-delay feedback control of unstable steady states in retarded time-delayed systems

We study the stability of unstable steady states in scalar retarded time-delayed systems subjected to a variable-delay feedback control. The important aspect of such a control problem is that time-delayed systems are already infinite-dimensional before the delayed feedback control is turned on. When the frequency of the modulation is large compared to the system's dynamics, the analytic approach consists of relating the stability properties of the resulting variable-delay system with those of an analogous distributed delay system. Otherwise, the stability domains are obtained by a numerical integration of the linearized variable-delay system. The analysis shows that the control domains are significantly larger than those in the usual time-delayed feedback control, and that the complexity of the domain structure depends on the form and the frequency of the delay modulation.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, RevTeX, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Experimental ancilla-assisted qubit transmission against correlated noise using quantum parity checking

We report the experimental demonstration of a transmission scheme of photonic qubits over unstabilized optical fibers, which has the plug-and-play feature as well as the ability to transmit any state of a qubit, regardless of whether it is known, unknown, or entangled to other systems. A high fidelity to the noiseless quantum channel was achieved by adding an ancilla photon after the signal photon within the correlation time of the fiber noise and by performing quantum parity checking. Simplicity, maintenance-free feature and robustness against path-length mismatches among the nodes make our scheme suitable for multi-user quantum communication networks.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; published in New J. Phys. and selected in IOP Selec

Recent advances on recursive filtering and sliding mode design for networked nonlinear stochastic systems: A survey

Copyright © 2013 Jun Hu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Some recent advances on the recursive filtering and sliding mode design problems for nonlinear stochastic systems with network-induced phenomena are surveyed. The network-induced phenomena under consideration mainly include missing measurements, fading measurements, signal quantization, probabilistic sensor delays, sensor saturations, randomly occurring nonlinearities, and randomly occurring uncertainties. With respect to these network-induced phenomena, the developments on filtering and sliding mode design problems are systematically reviewed. In particular, concerning the network-induced phenomena, some recent results on the recursive filtering for time-varying nonlinear stochastic systems and sliding mode design for time-invariant nonlinear stochastic systems are given, respectively. Finally, conclusions are proposed and some potential future research works are pointed out.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant nos. 61134009, 61329301, 61333012, 61374127 and 11301118, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant no. GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Sampling from a system-theoretic viewpoint

This paper studies a system-theoretic approach to the problem of reconstructing an analog signal from its samples. The idea, borrowed from earlier treatments in the control literature, is to address the problem as a hybrid model-matching problem in which performance is measured by system norms. \ud \ud The paper is split into three parts. In Part I we present the paradigm and revise the lifting technique, which is our main technical tool. In Part II optimal samplers and holds are designed for various analog signal reconstruction problems. In some cases one component is fixed while the remaining are designed, in other cases all three components are designed simultaneously. No causality requirements are imposed in Part II, which allows to use frequency domain arguments, in particular the lifted frequency response as introduced in Part I. In Part III the main emphasis is placed on a systematic incorporation of causality constraints into the optimal design of reconstructors. We consider reconstruction problems, in which the sampling (acquisition) device is given and the performance is measured by the $L^2$-norm of the reconstruction error. The problem is solved under the constraint that the optimal reconstructor is $l$-causal for a given $l\geq 0,$ i.e., that its impulse response is zero in the time interval $(-\infty,-l h),$ where $h$ is the sampling period. We derive a closed-form state-space solution of the problem, which is based on the spectral factorization of a rational transfer function

Inferring Network Connectivity by Delayed Feedback Control

We suggest a control based approach to topology estimation of networks with elements. This method first drives the network to steady states by a delayed feedback control; then performs structural perturbations for shifting the steady states times; and finally infers the connection topology from the steady states' shifts by matrix inverse algorithm () or -norm convex optimization strategy applicable to estimate the topology of sparse networks from perturbations. We discuss as well some aspects important for applications, such as the topology reconstruction quality and error sources, advantages and disadvantages of the suggested method, and the influence of (control) perturbations, inhomegenity, sparsity, coupling functions, and measurement noise. Some examples of networks with Chua's oscillators are presented to illustrate the reliability of the suggested technique

On the effect of quantization on performance at high rates

We study the effect of quantization on the performance of a scalar dynamical system in the high rate regime. We evaluate the LQ cost for two commonly used quantizers: uniform and logarithmic and provide a lower bound on performance of any centroid-based quantizer based on entropy arguments. We also consider the case when the channel drops data packets stochastically