Stabilizing inputs for implicit functional differential equations of the neutral type with unknown time-varying delays (Q2642952)

The paper provides sufficient conditions to design a controller stabilizing an uncertain nonlinear system affected by time-delay and modeled as an implicit differential equation. It uses a standard Lyapunov approach, gathering various results from the existing technical literature, the main difficulty being bounding the various terms entering the time-derivative of the Lyapunov functional candidate, under a collection of ad-hoc assumptions on the system components. Salient features of the designed controllers are that the gains depend explicitly on the amount of uncertainty (hence ensuring robustness) and that they are memoryless (they do not depend on the delayed states). The main drawbacks are that the gains of the controller may be large, and that it seems to be very difficult to measure the amount of pessimism of the sufficient conditions.