Sliding Mode Control and Subspace Stabilization Methodology for the Orbital Stabilization of Periodic Trajectories

The problem of orbital stabilization of periodic trajectories has been addressed in a series of publications: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Many of these works, e.g., [1, 2, 4, 7], employ the transverse linearization approach, which approximates the dynamics near a reference periodic orbit by a linear time-varying (LTV) system with periodic coefficients. As shown in [2, 8], a feedback designed to stabilize the trivial solution of this auxiliary LTV system can be used to construct a control law that stabilizes the orbit of the original nonlinear system. Under the mild assumption of controllability of the LTV system over one period, the LQR approach can be used to design the feedback. The practical effectiveness of this method was demonstrated in experiments with real robotic systems in [9, 10, 11]. A substantially different stabilization method for the LTV system was proposed in [5], where the authors developed an alternative scheme combining Floquet theory with sliding-mode control. Following this line of work, we show that a specific feedback linearization of the transverse dynamics yields an LTV system endowed with a stable invariant subspace. In this setting, the control objective reduces to driving all trajectories into the stable subspace, which is achieved via sliding-mode-based control. This method does not require solving the computationally demanding periodic LQR problem.