A constructive solution for stabilization via immersion and invariance: The cart and pendulum system

Immersion and Invariance (I&I) is the method to design asymptotically stabilizing control laws for nonlinear systems that was proposed in [Astolfi, A., & Ortega, R. (2003). Immersion and invariance: A new tool for stabilization and adaptive control of nonlinear systems. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 48, 590–606]. The key steps of I&I are (i) the definition of a target dynamics, whose order is strictly smaller than the order of the system to be controlled; (ii) the construction of an invariant manifold such that the restriction of the system dynamics to this manifold coincides with the target dynamics; (iii) the design of a control law that renders the manifold attractive and ensures that all signals are bounded. The second step requires the solution of a partial differential equation (PDE) that may be difficult to obtain. In this short note we use the classical cart and pendulum system to show that by interlacing the first and second steps, and invoking physical considerations, it is possible to obviate the solution of the PDE. To underscore the generality of the proposed variation of I&I, we show that it is also applicable to a class of n -dimensional systems that contain, as a particular case, the cart and pendulum system.