Supervisory control of switched nonlinear systems

The objective of this paper is to describe recent progress in the field of hybrid control of nonlinear systems. We address the problem of controlling a nonlinear dynamical process by means of a hybrid controller combining continuous dynamics with discrete logics, the latter used to switch, from time to time, between several continuous control laws. The hybrid control system considered in this paper relies on the use of a switching logic, which generates online and in a fully adaptive fashion, ‘sliding windows’ of the monitoring signals used to select the control action. It is shown that, under suitable conditions, the resulting supervisory control scheme ensures L_infinity-induced gain to the disturbance-to-state map, whether the process dynamics are constant or not.