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1. On infinitesimal contraction analysis for hybrid systems

   Burden, Samuel A.; Coogan, Samuel D. (December 2022, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control)

   Infinitesimal contraction analysis, wherein global convergence results are obtained from properties of local dynamics, is a powerful analysis tool. In this letter, we generalize infinitesimal contraction analysis to hybrid systems in which state-dependent guards trigger transitions defined by reset maps between modes that may have different norms and need not be of the same dimension. In contrast to existing literature, we do not restrict mode sequence or dwell time. We work in settings where the hybrid system flow is differentiable almost everywhere and its derivative is the solution to a jump-linear-time-varying differential equation whose jumps are defined by a saltation matrix determined from the guard, reset map, and vector field. Our main result shows that if the vector field is infinitesimally contracting, and if the saltation matrix is non-expansive, then the intrinsic distance between any two trajectories decreases exponentially in time. When bounds on dwell time are available, our approach yields a bound on the intrinsic distance between trajectories regardless of whether the dynamics are expansive or contractive. We illustrate our results using two examples: a constrained mechanical system and an electrical circuit with an ideal diode. 

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2. Hybrid control of switched LFT uncertain systems with time-varying input delays

   https://doi.org/10.1080/00207179.2021.1975197  

   Yuan, Chengzhi; Gu, Yan; Zeng, Wei (September 2021, International Journal of Control)

   This paper addresses the problem of hybrid control for a class of switched uncertain systems. The switched system under consideration is subject to structured uncertain dynamics in a linear fractional transformation (LFT) form and time-varying input delays. A novel hybrid controller is proposed, which consists of three major components: the integral quadratic constraint (IQC) dynamics, the continuous dynamics, and the jump dynamics. The IQC dynamics are developed by leveraging methodologies from robust control theory and are utilised to address the effects of time-varying input delays. The continuous dynamics are structured by feeding back not only measurement outputs but also some system's internal signals. The jump dynamics enforce a jump (update/reset) at every switching time instant for the states of both IQC dynamics and continuous dynamics. Based on this, robust stability of the overall hybrid closed-loop system is established under the average dwell time framework with multiple Lyapunov functions. Moreover, the associated control synthesis conditions are fully characterised as linear matrix inequalities, which can be solved efficiently. An application example on regulation of a nonlinear switched electronic circuit system has been used to demonstrate effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed approach. 

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3. iLQR for Piecewise-Smooth Hybrid Dynamical Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CDC45484.2021.9683506  

   Kong, Nathan J.; Council, George; Johnson, Aaron M. (December 2021, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control)

   Trajectory optimization is a popular strategy for planning trajectories for robotic systems. However, many robotic tasks require changing contact conditions, which is difficult due to the hybrid nature of the dynamics. The optimal sequence and timing of these modes are typically not known ahead of time. In this work, we extend the Iterative Linear Quadratic Regulator (iLQR) method to a class of piecewise-smooth hybrid dynamical systems with state jumps by allowing for changing hybrid modes in the forward pass, using the saltation matrix to update the gradient information in the backwards pass, and using a reference extension to account for mode mismatch. We demonstrate these changes on a variety of hybrid systems and compare the different strategies for computing the gradients. 

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4. Dwell Regions: Generalized Stay Regions For Streaming and Archival Trajectory Data

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3543850  

   Uddin, Reaz; Mahin, Mehnaz Tabassum; Rajan, Payas; Ravishankar, Chinya V.; Tsotras, Vassilis J. (January 2022, ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems)

   A region \(\mathcal {R} \) is a dwell region for a moving object O if, given a threshold distance r q and duration τ q , every point of \(\mathcal {R} \) remains within distance r q from O for at least time τ q . Points within \(\mathcal {R} \) are likely to be of interest to O , so identification of dwell regions has applications such as monitoring and surveillance. We first present a logarithmic-time online algorithm to find dwell regions in an incoming stream of object positions. Our method maintains the upper and lower bounds for the radius of the smallest circle enclosing the object positions, thereby greatly reducing the number of trajectory points needed to evaluate the query. It approximates the radius of the smallest circle enclosing a given subtrajectory within an arbitrarily small user-defined factor, and is also able to efficiently answer decision queries asking whether or not a dwell region exists. For the offline version of the dwell region problem, we first extend our online approach to develop the ρ -Index, which indexes subtrajectories using query radius ranges. We then refine this approach to obtain the τ -Index, which indexes subtrajectories using both query radius ranges and dwell durations. Our experiments using both real-world and synthetic datasets show that the online approach can scale up to hundreds of thousands of moving objects. For archived trajectories, our indexing approaches speed up queries by many orders of magnitude. 

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5. Hybrid Event Shaping to Stabilize Periodic Hybrid Orbits

   Zhu, James; Kong, Nathan J.; Council, George; Johnson, Aaron M. (May 2022, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation)

   Many controllers for legged robotic systems leverage open- or closed-loop control at discrete hybrid events to enhance stability. These controllers appear in several well studied phenomena such as the Raibert stepping controller, paddle juggling, and swing leg retraction. This work introduces hybrid event shaping (HES): a generalized method for analyzing and designing stable hybrid event controllers. HES utilizes the saltation matrix, which gives a closed-form equation for the effect that hybrid events have on stability. We also introduce shape parameters, which are higher order terms that can be tuned completely independently of the system dynamics to promote stability. Optimization methods are used to produce values of these parameters that optimize a stability measure. Hybrid event shaping captures previously developed control methods while also producing new optimally stable trajectories without the need for continuous-domain feedback. 

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