Discretisation & control of irregularly actuated and sampled LTI systems

Motivated by control tasks in neuro-prosthetic systems, a method for the exact discretisation of continuous-time LTI systems in presence of irregular actuation and sampling times is presented. In this approach, sequences for the desired sampling and actuation times form additional inputs to the discrete-time systems. An analytical evaluation for a class of practically relevant systems is presented that yields discrete-time state-space systems with non-constant coefficients. Because of the non-linearity introduced by the irregular time intervals, a linearising controller is proposed that allows to re-use standard linear controllers. A simulation example demonstrates the feasibility of the presented control approach for a neuro-prosthetic system.