Rank deficiency and superstability of hybrid systems

Abstract

The objectives of this paper are to study the rank properties of flows of hybrid systems, show that they are fundamentally different from those of smooth dynamical systems, and to consider applications that emphasize the importance of these differences. It is well known that the flow of a smooth dynamical system has rank equal to the space on which it evolves. We prove that, in contrast, the rank of a solution to a hybrid system, a hybrid execution, is always less than the dimension of the space on which it evolves and in fact falls within possibly distinct upper and lower bounds that can be computed explicitly. The main contribution of this work is the derivation of conditions for when an execution fails to have maximal rank, i.e., when it is rank deficient. Given the importance of periodic behavior in many hybrid systems applications, for example in bipedal robots, these conditions are applied to the special case of periodic hybrid executions. Finally, we use the rank deficiency conditions to derive superstability conditions describing when periodic executions have rank equal to 0, that is, we determine when the execution is completely insensitive to perturbations in initial conditions. The results of this paper are illustrated on three separate applications, two of which are models of bipedal walking robots: the classical single-domain planar compass biped and the two-domain planar kneed biped.