Dynamic System Stability Verification Using Numerical Simulator

Abstract: There are recent shifts in demand for design controllers from simplified to complex model-based. Although simplification approaches are successful in many areas of engineering control systems, high-fidelity simulation-based control design, for example, reinforcement learning, has been rising in robotics areas. On the other hand, the lack of assurances about the stability and robustness of simulation-based control design restricts its applications to safety-critical systems. We develop computational methods to verify the stability and robustness of safety-critical systems. By extending the inverse Lyapunov theorem, we present a practical method to compute the constants required to check the exponential stability conditions of dynamic systems implemented in a numerical simulator. It is shown that the norm-bound of the propagated states is a function of the numerical integration steps, where the numerical simulator may include discontinuous jumps of states. The energy bounds for the transition states are obtained based on the exponential stability assumption of the inverse Lyapunov theorem. Finally, a finite sampling algorithm provides the deterministic stability guarantee for the continuous state space.