Exponential Stabilization of Driftless Nonlinear Control Systems using Homogeneous Feedback

Robert T. M'Closkey and Richard M. Murray
IEEE T. Automatic Control, 42(5):614-628, 1997
CDS Technical Report CDS 95-012

This paper focuses on the problem of exponential stabilization of controllable, driftless systems using time-varying, homogeneous feedback. The analysis is performed with respect to a homogeneous norm in a non-standard dilation that is compatible with the algebraic structure of the control Lie algebra. Using this structure, we show that any continuous, time-varying controller that achieves exponential stabilization relative to the Euclidean norm is necessarily non-Lipschitz. Despite these restrictions, we provide a set of constructive, sufficient conditions for extending smooth, asymptotic stabilizers to homogeneous, exponential stabilizers. The modified feedbacks are everywhere continuous, smooth away from the origin, and can be extended to a large class of systems with torque inputs. The feedback laws are applied to an experimental mobile robot and show significant improvement in convergence rate over smooth stabilizers.

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