Stabilization and robustness analysis for time-varying systems with time-varying delays using a sequential subpredictors approach

Abstract

We provide a new sequential predictors approach for the exponential stabilization of linear time-varying systems. Our method circumvents the problem of constructing and estimating distributed terms in the control laws, and allows arbitrarily large input delay bounds, pointwise time-varying input delays, and uncertainties. Instead of using distributed terms, our approach to handling longer delays is to increase the number of predictors. We obtain explicit formulas to find lower bounds for the number of required predictors. The formulas involve bounds on the delays and on the derivatives of the delays. We illustrate our method in three examples.