Robustness and Performance Analysis For Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

Dr. Ufuk Topcu

I will present recently developed tools for nonlinear robustness analysis oriented toward certification and verification of safety critical systems. Understanding the nonlinear nature of flight dynamics will be especially important for next generation aerial vehicles, because a high percentage of them will be autonomous and capable of highly aggressive maneuvers using nonlinear, adaptive, and reconfigurable flight control systems. In our work, we utilize regions-of-attraction and nonlinear system gains as quantitative robustness measures. In the first part of this talk, I will focus on a new method incorporating prior information about the system from simulations into optimization-based region-of-attraction analysis. Then, I will move on to a branch-and-bound type of procedure for local stability analysis of systems with parametric uncertainty.