Controlling coexisting attractors of a class of non-autonomous dynamical systems (Q2670219)

The paper addresses the problem of control design for several classes of nonautonomous dynamical systems possessing disconnected attractors, as for example two spatially remote limit cycles. The control goal is to drive the system state towards the desired attractor whilst the initial state belongs to other possibly stable attractors. This set of attractors is called undesirable. The control design is based upon a virtual continuous path for the trajectory that connects the undesirable attractor and the desired one and is achieved by varying the parameters of the system accordingly. The behavior of the controlled system is studied numerically for both nonsmooth and smooth dynamical systems, using a soft-impact and a Duffing oscillator as examples. It is shown that the proposed control design approach can be also implemented via the external control input. Extensive numerical simulations are presented to validate the proposed control techniques.