A Remark on an Example By Teel–Hespanha With Applications to Cascaded Systems

The properties of a system, proposed by Teel and Hespanha, which is globally exponentially stable but with state that can be driven to infinity by an arbitrarily small exponentially decaying disturbance, are discussed in detail. These are used to propose a family of systems with a similar property and to argue that unstable behavior may be nongeneric and not detected by means of simulations. Finally, sufficient conditions for the existence of unbounded trajectories in cascaded systems are given