Nonlinear Bilateral Full-State Feedback Trajectory Tracking for a Class of Viscous Hamilton-Jacobi PDEs

Abstract

We tackle the boundary control problem for a class of viscous Hamilton-Jacobi PDEs, considering bilateral actuation, i.e., at the two boundaries of a 1-D spatial domain. First, we solve the nonlinear trajectory generation problem for this type of PDEs, providing the necessary feedforward actions at both boundaries. Second, in order to guarantee trajectory tracking with an arbitrary decay rate, we construct nonlinear, full-state feedback laws employed at the two boundary ends. All of our designs are explicit since they are constructed interlacing a feedback linearizing transformation (which we introduce) with backstepping. Due to the fact that the linearizing transformation is locally invertible, only regional stability results are established, which are, nevertheless, accompanied with region of attraction estimates. Our stability proofs are based on the utilization of the linearizing transformation together with the employment of backstepping transformations, suitably formulated to handle the case of bilateral actuation. We illustrate the developed methodologies via application to traffic flow control and we present consistent simulation results.