A characterization of normal forms for control systems (Q2516976)

Normal form transformations constitute a very useful method in the study of the local behavior and bifurcation of dynamical systems defined by nonlinear systems of ordinary differential equations \[ \dot x = f(x) \] around an equilibrium point. The method is based on a sequence of near-identity changes of coordinates, enabling to annihilate unessential terms in the Taylor expansion of \(f\), and simplifying in this way the investigation. An improvement of this classical method rests on the choice of a convenient inner-product in the space of homogeneous vector fields. In this paper the authors extend the inner-product method to the computation of normal forms for nonlinear control systems of the form \[ \dot x = f(x,u). \]