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In this article, we introduce a new paradigm of control, called hands-off control, which can save energy and reduce CO2 emissions in control systems. A hands-off control is defined as a control that has a much shorter support than the horizon length. The maximum hands-off control is the minimum support (or sparsest) control among all admissible controls. With maximum hands-off control, actuators in the feedback control system can be stopped during time intervals over which the control values are zero. We show the maximum hands-off control is given by L1 optimal control, for which we also show numerical computation formulas., Comment: SICE Control Division Multi Symposium 2014 (Japanese domestic conference); English translation from Japanese article

We present a hybrid scheme for the parameter and state estimation of nonlinear continuous-time systems, which is inspired by the supervisory setup used for control. State observers are synthesized for some nominal parameter values and a criterion is designed to select one of these observers at any given time instant, which provides state and parameter estimates. Assuming that a persistency of excitation condition holds, the convergence of the parameter and state estimation errors to zero is ensured up to a margin, which can be made as small as desired by increasing the number of observers. To reduce the potential computational complexity of the scheme, we explain how the sampling of the parameter set can be dynamically updated using a zoom-in procedure. This strategy typically requires a fewer number of observers for a given estimation error margin compared to the static sampling policy. The results are shown to be applicable to linear systems and to a class of nonlinear systems. We illustrate the applicability of the approach by estimating the synaptic gains and the mean membrane potentials of a neural mass model., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions of Automatic Control

This paper presents an averaging method for nonlinear systems defined on Riemannian manifolds. We extend closeness of solutions results for ordinary differential equations on $R^{n}$ to dynamical systems defined on Riemannian manifolds by employing differential geometry. A generalization of closeness of solutions for periodic dynamical systems on compact time intervals is derived for dynamical systems evolving on compact Riemannian manifolds. Under local asymptotic (exponential) stability of the average vector field, we further relax the compactness of the ambient Riemannian manifold and obtain the closeness of solutions on the infinite time interval by employing the notion of uniform normal neighborhoods of an equilibrium point of a vector field. These results are also presented for time-varying dynamical systems where their averaged systems are almost globally asymptotically or exponentially stable on compact manifolds. The main results of the paper are illustrated by several examples.

This paper proposes several Converse Lyapunov Theorems for nonlinear dynamical systems defined on smooth connected Riemannian manifolds and characterizes properties of corresponding Lyapunov functions in a normal neighborhood of an equilibrium. We extend the methods of constructing of Lyapunov functions for ordinary differential equations on $\mathds{R}^{n}$ to dynamical systems defined on Riemannian manifolds by employing the differential geometry. By employing the derived properties of Lyapunov functions, we obtained the stability of perturbed dynamical systems on Riemannian manifolds. The results are obtained by employing the notions of normal neighborhoods, the injectivity radius on Riemannian manifolds and existence of bump functions on manifolds.

We consider an exponentially stable closed loop interconnection of a continuous linear plant and a continuous linear controller, and we study the problem of interconnecting the plant output to the controller input through a digital channel. We propose a family of "transmission-lazy" sensors whose goal is to transmit the measured plant output information as little as possible while preserving closed-loop stability. In particular, we propose two transmission policies, providing conditions on the transmission parameters. These guarantee global asymptotic stability when the plant state is available or when an estimate of the state is available (provided by a classical continuous linear observer). Moreover, under a specific condition, they guarantee global exponential stability, Comment: 16 pages

In this article, we propose a new paradigm of control, called a maximum-hands-off control. A hands-off control is defined as a control that has a much shorter support than the horizon length. The maximum-hands-off control is the minimum-support (or sparsest) control among all admissible controls. We first prove that a solution to an L1-optimal control problem gives a maximum-hands-off control, and vice versa. This result rationalizes the use of L1 optimality in computing a maximum-hands-off control. The solution has in general the "bang-off-bang" property, and hence the control may be discontinuous. We then propose an L1/L2-optimal control to obtain a continuous hands-off control. Examples are shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method., Comment: 2013 IEEE 52nd Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)

Event-triggered and self-triggered control have recently been proposed as implementation strategies that considerably reduce the resources required for control. Although most of the work so far has focused on closing a single control loop, some researchers have started to investigate how these new implementation strategies can be applied when closing multiple-feedback loops in the presence of physically distributed sensors and actuators. In this paper, we consider a scenario where the distributed sensors, actuators, and controllers communicate via a shared wired channel. We use our recent prescriptive framework for the event-triggered control of nonlinear systems to develop novel policies suitable for the considered distributed scenario. Afterwards, we explain how self-triggering rules can be deduced from the developed event-triggered strategies.

We present a prescriptive framework for the event-triggered control of nonlinear systems. Rather than closing the loop periodically, as traditionally done in digital control, in event-triggered implementations the loop is closed according to a state-dependent criterion. Event-triggered control is especially well suited for embedded systems and networked control systems since it reduces the amount of resources needed for control such as communication bandwidth. By modeling the event-triggered implementations as hybrid systems, we provide Lyapunov-based conditions to guarantee the stability of the resulting closed-loop system and explain how they can be utilized to synthesize event-triggering rules. We illustrate the generality of the approach by showing how it encompasses several existing event-triggering policies and by developing new strategies which further reduce the resources needed for control.

Recently, a framework for controller design of sampled-data nonlinear systems via their approximate discrete-time models has been proposed in the literature. In this paper we develop novel tools that can be used within this framework and that are very useful for tracking problems. In particular, results for stability analysis of parameterized time-varying discrete-time cascaded systems are given. This class of models arises naturally when one uses an approximate discrete-time model to design a stabilizing or tracking controller for a sampled-data plant. While some of our results parallel their continuous-time counterparts, the stability properties that are considered, the conditions that are imposed and the the proof techniques that are used are tailored for approximate discrete-time systems and are technically different from those in the continuous-time context. We illustrate the utility of our results in the case study of the tracking control of a mobile robot. This application is fairly illustrative of the technical differences and obstacles encountered in the analysis of discrete-time parameterized systems.