Effects of dither shapes in nonsmooth feedback systems: experimental results and theoretical insight

Dither signals are commonly used to compensate for nonlinearities in feedback systems in electronics and mechanics. Recently, theoretical results were proposed for the analysis of a particularly interesting class of nonsmooth systems, namely relay feedback systems with triangular dither. In this paper the class of dither signals is enlarged by considering square and trapezoidal dither: it is shown how the dither shape affects the behavior of nonsmooth feedback systems, differently from the case of dither in Lipschitz continuous systems. Experimental results support this fact and a theoretical insight is given in order to explain the phenomena.