On the robustification of digital event-based stabilizers for nonlinear time-delay systems

In this paper, the robust stabilization problem by means of quantized sampled-data event-based (QSE) controllers is investigated for nonlinear systems affected by state delays and unknown disturbances. In particular, a methodology for the design of robust QSE stabilizers is provided for control-affine nonlinear systems affected by unknown actuation disturbances and unknown measurement errors. Firstly, the notion of Steepest Descent Feedback (SDF), continuous or not, is suitably revised in order to deal with the robustification of event-based controllers. Then, Input-to-State Stability (ISS) redesign methodologies are used to provide the robustification term which is added to the SDF at hand in order to arbitrarily attenuate the effects of unknown external disturbances affecting the considered control scheme. A spline approximation approach is used in order to cope with the problem of the possible non-availability in the buffer of suitable past values of the system state required for the correct application of the proposed robust QSE controller. It is proved that there exist a suitably fast sampling and an accurate quantization of the input/output channels such that: the robust QSE implementation of SDFs, continuous or not, ensures the semi-global practical stability of the related closed-loop system, regardless of the above disturbances, provided that the observation errors affects marginally the new added control term. The stabilization in the sample-and-hold sense theory is used as a tool to prove the results. The provided results include the case of non-uniform quantization of the input/output channels and the case of aperiodic sampling. Applications are presented in order to validate the results.