Control of slowly-varying linear systems

State feedback control of slowly varying linear continuous-time and discrete-time systems with bounded coefficient matrices is studied in terms of the frozen-time approach. This study centers on pointwise stabilizable systems. These are systems for which there exists a state feedback gain matrix placing the frozen-time closed-loop eigenvalues to the left of a line Re s=- gamma <0 in the complex plane (or within a disk of radius rho <1 in the discrete-time case). It is shown that if the entries of a pointwise stabilizing feedback gain matrix ar continuously differentiable functions of the entries of the system coefficient matrices, then the closed-loop system is uniformly asymptotically stable if the rate of time variation of the system coefficient matrices is sufficiently small. It is also shown that for pointwise stabilizable systems with a sufficiently slow rate of time variation in the system coefficients, a stabilizing feedback gain matrix can be computed from the positive definite solution of a frozen-time algebraic Riccati equation.<
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