Section: New Results

Studies of systems with long delays

Participants : Frederic Mazenc, Michael Malisoff [LSU] , Emilia Fridman [Tel-Aviv University] .

We solved several problems of observer and control designs pertaining to the fundamental (and difficult) case where a delay in the input is too long for being neglected.

I) We considered in [17] the problem of stabilizing a linear continuous-time system with discrete-time measurements and a sampled input with a pointwise constant delay. In a first part, we designed a continuous-discrete observer which converges when the maximum time interval between two consecutive measurements is sufficiently small. In a second part, we constructed a dynamic output feedback by using a technique which is strongly reminiscent of the so called 'reduction model approach'. It stabilizes the system when the maximal time between two consecutive sampling instants is sufficiently small. No limitation on the size of the delay was imposed and an ISS property with respect to additive disturbances was established.

II) We solved stabilization problems for linear time-varying systems under input delays. We showed how changes of coordinates lead to systems with time invariant drifts, which are covered by the reduction model method and which lead to the problem of stabilizing a time-varying system without delay. For continuous-time periodic systems, we used Floquet's theory to find the changes of coordinates. We also proved an analogue for discrete time systems, through an original discrete-time extension of Floquet's theory [19].

III) In [21] and [42], we proposed a prediction based stabilization approach for a general class of nonlinear time-varying systems with pointwise delay in the input. It is based on a recent new prediction strategy, which makes it possible to circumvent the problem of constructing and estimating distributed terms in the expression for the stabilizing control laws. We observed that our result applies in cases where other recent results do not, including notably the case where a time-varying delay is present.