A Controllability Criterion for a Class of Linear Systems

A linear system is completely controllable if for any initial state a control can be found to take the state of the system to the origin of the state space. Present criteria for testing linear systems for controllability require knowing the weighting function matrix of the linear system. In this paper a new criterion is presented which is applicable to a broad class of linear systems defined by linear n-dimensional ordinary vector-matrix differential equations; for this criterion only the coefficient matrices of the differential equation need to be known.