Open-Loop Control Design for Contraction in Affine Nonlinear Systems

This paper presents two main contributions. First, it is shown that if a nonlinear time-varying system is contractive, then it is incrementally exponentially stable. Second, building on this result, a method is proposed, for designing feedforward inputs that induce contraction or incremental exponential stability in affine-in-control systems. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through illustrative examples.