Control synthesis for practical stabilization of quantized linear systems

In this work we face the stability problem for quantized control systems (QCS). A discrete–time single–input linear model is considered and, motivated by technological applications, we assume that a uniform quantization of the control set is a priori fixed. As it is well known, for QCS only practical stability properties can be achieved, therefore we focus on the existence and construction of quantized controllers capable of steering a system to within invariant neighborhoods of the equilibrium. The main contribution of the paper consists in a theorem which provides a condition for the practical stabilization in a fixed number of steps: not only the result is interesting in itself, but also it enables to construct a family of stabilizing controllers by means of Model Predictive Control (MPC) techniques. In the last part of the paper some results on the characterization of controlled–invariant sets are reviewed and a lower bound on the size of invariant sets is provided.