Semi-global stabilisation of fractional-order linear systems with actuator saturation by output feedback

This paper considers the problem of the semi-global asymptotic stabilisation of fractional-order (FO) linear systems subject to actuator saturation by output feedback. To solve the problem, a family of observer-based linear output feedback laws, parameterised in a positive scalar, is proposed by means of the low gain feedback design technique. The design applies to FO linear systems that are stabilisable and detectable, but not exponentially unstable. For such an FO system under the proposed observer-based linear low gain output feedback, the peak value of the control input for a given initial condition can be made arbitrarily small to avoid actuator saturation by decreasing the value of the parameter towards zero and thus semi-global asymptotic stabilisation is achieved. To obtain these results, we establish the properties of low gain feedback, derive asymptotic expansions and the bounds of high-order derivatives of the Mittag-Leffler (ML) functions to estimate the state responses of FO linear systems, and explicitly construct a Hermitian matrix to satisfy a linear matrix inequality (LMI) stability condition for FO linear systems. The results in this paper extend the corresponding results for integer-order (IO) linear systems.