Substability and Substabilization: Control of Subfully Actuated Systems

The region of attraction of the Lyapunov asymptotic stability at the origin is defined to be a ball centered at the origin, which is clearly simply connected and also bounded in the local case. In this article, the concept of substability is proposed, which allows “gaps” and “holes” in the region of attraction of the Lyapunov exponential stability, and also allows the origin to be a boundary point of the region of attraction. The concept is meaningful and useful in many practical applications, but is particularly made so with the control of single- and multi-order subfully actuated systems. Specifically, the singular set of a sub-FAS is first defined, and a substabilizing controller is then designed such that the closed-loop system is a constant linear one with an arbitrarily assignable eigen-polynomial, but with its initial values restricted within a so-called region of exponential attraction (ROEA). Consequently, the substabilizing controller drives all the state trajectories starting from the ROEA exponentially to the origin. The introduced concept of substabilization is of great importance because, on the one side, it is often practically useful since the designed ROEA is often large enough for certain applications, while on the other side, Lyapunov asymptotically stabilizing controllers can be further easily established based on substabilization. Several examples are given to demonstrate the proposed theories.