New absolute stability criteria for uncertain Lur'e systems with time-varying delays

This paper deals with absolute stability of uncertain Lur'e systems with time-varying delay. By introducing a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional related to a second-order Bessel-Legendre inequality, some absolute stability criteria are derived for the system under study. Different from some existing approaches, a remarkable feature of this paper is that the time-derivative of the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional is estimated by a linear function rather than a quadratic function on the time-varying delay, thanks to the introduction of four extra vectors. As a result, the resulting absolute stability criteria are of less conservatism than some existing ones, which is demonstrated through three examples.