The main objective of this paper is to propose an alternative procedure to
carry out one of the key steps of immersion and invariance stabilising
controller design. Namely, the one that ensures attractivity of the manifold
whose internal dynamics contains a copy of the desired system behaviour.
Towards this end we invoke contraction theory principles and ensure the
attractivity of the manifold rendering it horizontally contractive. The main
advantage of adopting this alternative approach is to make more systematic the
last step of the design with more explicit degrees of freedom to accomplish the
task. The classical case of systems in feedback form is used to illustrate the
proposed controller design.This work is partially supported by National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program 2013CB035406) ; National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC: 61134007 and 61320106009).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CDC.2015.740268