Cascaded feedback linearization and its application to stabilization of nonholonomic systems

In this paper, a new cascaded feedback linearization problem is formulated and a set of conditions on the cascaded feedback linearizability are established for a class of two-input affine nonlinear systems. The proposed cascaded feedback linearization method enlarges the classes of nonlinear systems which can be dealt with using the feedback linearization technique. In particular, the proposed design can be applied to address the feedback stabilization problem for a few classes of nonlinear systems which have uncontrollable linearization and do not satisfy the standard feedback linearization conditions. As an illustrative application, the proposed cascade feedback linearization concept is used to solve the feedback stabilization problem of nonholonomic systems within the framework of continuously differentiable state feedback control. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the proposed method.