This study deals with state feedback H ∞ control design of continuous-time switched affine systems. The main purpose is to design a set of state feedback gains together with a switching function assuring global asymptotic stability of a desired equilibrium point. The equilibrium point belongs to a set of attainable ones to be determined. Moreover, the control design must take into account a pre-specified upper bound to the L 2 gain from the external input to the controlled output. Two different switching functions are proposed and discussed. The first one depends only on the state and the other depends also on the external input. The results are compared with recent ones available in the literature to date, as for instance, those based on a max-type Lyapunov function and those commonly used to assure practical stability. Numerical examples illustrate the theoretical results and are used for comparisons.
IntroductionSwitched systems have attracted the attention of the scientific community in the last decades because of their high potential for practical applications, as for instance, in power electronics [1-3].They represent a subclass of hybrid systems characterised by having a switching rule that selects at each instant of time one of the available subsystems. This switching rule can be arbitrary, see [4], or a control variable that must be designed in order to assure stability and good performance for the overall system. Another possible control technique is based on sliding mode control, as it has been proposed in [5]. For switched linear systems, the literature presents several important results concerning the control design of a switching rule based on state feedback [6, 7] and on output feedback [8,9]. One interesting characteristic is that the switching strategy can assure global asymptotic stability even if all subsystems are unstable. Moreover, the recent paper [10] shows that, even if all subsystems are stable, a consistent switching rule can enhance the global performance when compared with that of each isolated subsystem. The articles [11][12][13] and the books [14,15] are surveys on this topic. Switched affine systems are more involved since they present several equilibrium points composing a region on the state space. Hence, the control goals consist in determining a set of attainable equilibrium points and a switching rule that guides any trajectory of the system, starting from an arbitrary initial condition, to the desired equilibrium, which can not be shared by any of the subsystems. The literature presents some results about stabilisation based on optimal control, see [2,16,17], and on Lyapunov method approach, see [1,3,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25], where [19,25] deal with sampled-data implementation. Most of them, as for instance, [3,18] are based on a quadratic Lyapunov function and show that the existence of a stable convex combination of the subsystems state-space matrices is a sufficient condition for global asymptotic stability. Another recent technique is based on a max-type Lyapunov ...