Beyond Nonlinear Small-Gain Design: DADS with Partial-State Feedback

TL;DR

This paper extends the DADS control scheme combined with IOS to partial-state feedback for interconnected ODEs and PDEs, enabling robust regulation without prior disturbance bounds.

Contribution

It introduces a novel partial-state DADS controller design for interconnected ODE-PDE systems, relaxing small-gain theorem requirements.

Findings

DADS achieves robust regulation for heat, transport, and wave PDEs.

The control scheme works without knowing disturbance or parameter bounds.

Robust regulation is proven for interconnected systems with external disturbances.

Abstract

Eduardo Sontag and coauthors studied Input-to-Output Stability (IOS) and the output asymptotic gain property. These notions changed control theory and recently had an impact on robust adaptive control through the Deadzone-Adapted Disturbance Suppression (DADS) control scheme. Moreover, recently the notion of IOS was extended to systems described by Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). In this work, we celebrate Eduardo Sontag by combining DADS and IOS for PDEs: we study the partial-state regulation problem for a scalar Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) which is interconnected with a possibly infinite-dimensional system. In such a case the DADS control scheme can allow an escape from the requirements of the small-gain theorem that is mainly used for partial-state feedback. We show the design procedure of partial-state DADS controllers and we prove robust regulation even in the presence of external inputs (disturbances) without assuming knowledge of any disturbance/parameter bounds. The DADS controller is applied to three different cases of the interconnection of an ODE with an almost completely unknown: (a) heat PDE, (b) transport PDE, and (c) wave PDE with viscous damping. We show that the same DADS controller can achieve robust regulation in all three cases.