Digital Event-Based Stabilization of Nonlinear Time-Delay Systems

In this paper, the stabilization problem of nonlinear time-delay systems via quantized sampled-data event-based controllers is investigated. Fully nonlinear (i.e., possibly non-affine in the control) systems affected by state delays are studied. Sufficient conditions are provided for the existence of a suitably fast sampling and of an accurate quantization of the input/output channels such that the digital implementation of the continuous-time controller at hand, updated through a proposed event-triggered mechanism, ensures the semi-global practical stability property, with arbitrarily small final target ball of the origin, of the related closed-loop system. A spline approximation methodology is used in order to cope with the problem of the possible non-availability in the buffer of suitable past values of the system variables needed for the digital implementation of the controller. The stabilization in the sample-and-hold sense theory is used as a tool to prove the results. In the theory here developed, the case of non-uniform quantization of the input/output channels and the case of aperiodic sampling are both included. The proposed theoretical results are validated through an application concerning the plasma glucose regulation problem in type-2 diabetic patients.