Stabilization of linear systems with distributed delay and saturation nonlinearity

This paper is concerned with stabilization of a linear system with distributed input delay and input saturation. Both constant and time-varying delays are considered. In the case that the input delay is constant, under the stabilizability assumption on an auxiliary system, it is shown that the system can be stabilized by state feedback for an arbitrarily large delay as long as the open-loop system is not exponentially unstable. In the case that the input delay is time-varying, but bounded, it is shown that the system can be stabilized by state feedback if the non-asymptotically stable poles of the open-loop system are all located at the origin. In both cases, stabilizing controllers are explicitly constructed by utilizing the parametric Lyapunov equation based low gain design approach we recently developed. It is also shown that in the presence of actuator saturation and under the same assumptions on the system, these controllers achieve semi-global stabilization. Some discussions on the assumptions we impose on the system are given. A numerical example illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed stabilization approach.