Stability impact of small delays in proportional–derivative state feedback

This paper points out specific stability problems of the state derivative and proportional–derivative state feedback which may result from the presence of otherwise negligible delays in the control loops. It is shown that the stability problems arise from the neutral character of the closed-loop system with the state derivative action under small delay perturbations. As the main result, a stability criterion is derived for a safe implementation of the state derivative feedback. Furthermore, a scheme including filtered state derivative feedback is proposed to overcome the destabilizing effects of small feedback delays. Two application examples are presented. From a theoretical point of view, the main contribution of the paper lies in the stability theory of linear neutral equations with dependent delays, subjected to delay perturbations.