Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Su, R..
The development of the transformation theory is discussed. Results and applications concerning the use of this design technique for automatic flight control of aircraft are presented. The theory examines the transformation of nonlinear systems to linear systems. The tracking of linear models by nonlinear plants is discussed. Results of manned simulation are also presented.
This paper is presenting an overview of the theory of transformations from nonlinear systems to linear systems. Topics covered include (1) necessary and sufficient conditions for transformations to exist, (2) a method of constructing transformations (3) robustness in design (based on transformations theory) and Liapunov functions, (4) estimation theory, and (5) the relationship between transformation theory and 'nonlinear zeros'. Application of these results to automatic flight control is presented in another paper at this session.
In this paper Brockett's feedback invariants of nonlinear systems are generalized to a larger class of transformations. In terms of these invariants, the recent results on linear equivalents of nonlinear systems to the multiple-input case have also been extended.
A theorem and its corollary are presented in which conditions are stated for a global transformation of a nonlinear system to a linear system. An explicit method for constructing such a transformation is given, and the important noncharacteristic matrix is introduced. Examples illustrating the technique are presented.
Sufficient conditions that a two-dimensional system with output is locally observable are presented. Known results depend on time derivatives of the output and the inverse function theorem. In some cases, no informaton is provided by these theories, and one must study observability by other methods. The observability problem is dualized to the controllability problem, and the deep results of Hermes on local controllability are applied to prove a theorem concerning local observability.
Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for a time-varying nonlinear system of specific form to be transformed into a time-invariant controllable linear system. Since the present work will be in a neighborhood of the origin, it is unnecessary to name specific sets and it is assumed that all assumptions, conditions and results hold in an open set in the appropriate Euclidean space that contains the origin. This theory can be combined with the global inverse function theorems to produce global results.