An improved result on the stability analysis of nonlinear systems

Abstract

An improved approach for stability analysis of nonlinear systems that works when traditional methods do not is proposed. The complex, possibly higher-dimensional nonlinear system is viewed as being composed of several isolated but interconnected subsystems. The proposed approach divides the complicated stability analysis job into two simpler jobs: analyzing the stability of each isolated subsystem and studying the properties of the interconnections. It is assumed that the interconnections can be bounded by a function of the norm of the state variables. This allows for more general interconnections than other approaches. Examples and computer simulations show that the approach can give results even when the problem is not tractable by other standard techniques. The method is applied to mobile robots.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>