STABILITY ANALYSIS FOR SANDWICH SYSTEMS WITH BACKLASH: AN LMI APPROACH

This paper addresses the problem of stability analysis for a certain class of nonlinear systems resulting from a sandwiched backlash operator in the connection of a plant and an actuator device. Constructive conditions based on LMIs to ensure the stability of the sandwich system are proposed by using some suitable Lyapunov functions and generalized sector conditions. The associated set of all the admissible equilibrium points is precisely defined. Extensions to the case where some parameters of the backlash nonlinearity are uncertain are provided.