Zero dynamics of sampled nonlinear systems (Q1115832)

The zero dynamics of sampled nonlinear single-input, single-output systems is studied. After defining the notion of zero dynamics for discrete-time systems it is shown that the dimension of the zero dynamics of a sampled system is equal to n-1 (n being the dimension of the state space). Furthermore, in accordance with the linear case, it is shown that if the characteristic index of the continuous-time system is zero then the sampled system has asymptotically stable zero dynamics if and only if the zero dynamics of the continuous-time system is asymptotically stable. On the other hand, if the characteristic index of the continuous-time system is greater than one, then the zero dynamics of the sampled system is always unstable. The case of characteristic index equal to one remains unsolved.