Section: Scientific Foundations
Structure of nonlinear control systems
In most problems, choosing the adapted coordinates, or the right quantities that describe a phenomenon, sheds light on a path to the solution. In control systems, it is often crucial to analyze the structure of the model, deduced from physical principles, of the plant of be controlled; this may lead to putting it via some transformations in a simpler form, or a form that is most suitable for control design. For instance, equivalence to a linear system may allow to use linear control; also, the so-called “flatness” property drastically simplifies path planning [48] , [63] .
A better understanding of the “set of nonlinear models”, partly classifying them, has another motivation than facilitating control design for a given system and its model: it may also be a necessary step towards a theory of “nonlinear identification” and modeling. Linear identification is a mature area of control science; its success is mostly due to a very fine knowledge of the structure of the class of linear models: similarly, any progress in the understanding of the structure of the class of nonlinear models would be a contribution to a possible theory of nonlinear identification.
These topics are central in control theory, but raise very difficult mathematical questions: static feedback classification is a geometric problem feasible in principle, although describing invariants explicitly is technically very difficult; and conditions for dynamic feedback equivalence and linearization raise unsolved mathematical problems, that make one wonder about decidability (Consider the simple system with state and two controls that reads after elimination of the controls; it is not known whether it is equivalent to a linear system, or flat; this is because the property amounts to existence of a formula giving the general solution as a function of two arbitrary functions of time and their derivatives up to a certain order, but no bound on this order is known a priori, even for this very particular example.).