Contraction-based stabilisation of nonlinear singularly perturbed systems and application to high gain feedback

Recent development of contraction theory-based analysis has opened the door for inspecting differential behaviour of singularly perturbed systems. In this paper, a contraction theory-based framework is proposed for stabilisation of singularly perturbed systems. The primary objective is to design a feedback controller to achieve bounded tracking error for both standard and non-standard singularly perturbed systems. This framework provides relaxation over traditional quadratic Lyapunov-based method as there is no need to satisfy interconnection conditions during controller design algorithm. Moreover, the stability bound does not depend on smallness of singularly perturbed parameter and robust to additive bounded uncertainties. Combined with high gain scaling, the proposed technique is shown to assure contraction of approximate feedback linearisable systems. These findings extend the class of nonlinear systems which can be made contracting.