Stabilization of non-admissible curves for a class of nonholonomic systems

The problem of tracking an arbitrary curve in the state space is considered for underactuated driftless control-affine systems. This problem is formulated as the stabilization of a time-varying family of sets associated with a neighborhood of the reference curve. An explicit control design scheme is proposed for the class of controllable systems whose degree of nonholonomy is equal to 1. It is shown that the trajectories of the closed-loop system converge exponentially to any given neighborhood of the reference curve provided that the solutions are defined in the sense of sampling. This convergence property is also illustrated numerically by several examples of nonholonomic systems of degrees 1 and 2.Comment: This is the author's version of the manuscript accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the 2019 European Control Conference (ECC'19

Desynchronization of coupled phase oscillators, with application to the Kuramoto system under mean-field feedback

International audienceThis note introduces two notions of desynchronization for interconnected phase oscillators by requiring that phases drift away from one another either at all times or in average. It provides a characterization of each of these two notions based on the grounded variable associated to the system, and relates them to a classical notion of instability valid in Euclidean spaces. An illustration is provided through the Kuramoto system, which is shown to be desynchronizable by proportional mean-field feedback

Adjoint and Hamiltonian input-output differential equations

Based on developments in the theory of variational and Hamiltonian control systems by Crouch and van der Schaft (1987), this paper answers two questions: given an input-output differential equation description of a nonlinear system, what is the adjoint variational system in input-output differential form and what are the conditions for the system to be Hamiltonian, i.e., such that the variational and the adjoint variational systems coincide? This resulting set of conditions is then used to generalize classical conditions such as the well-known Helmholtz conditions for the inverse problem in classical mechanics