Federico Bribiesca-Argomedo

arXiv2026

On hyperbolic PDEs, filtered feedback control laws, and fractal-like stability crossing curves

The paper addresses the boundary control of a class of hyperbolic PDEs, based on an equivalent representation in terms of an integral-difference equation. The situation is considered where direct compensation of reflection terms induces a fragile closed-loop system, in the sense of lack of strong stability. This is theoretically resolved by adding a low-pass filter to the control law, but the choice of its cut-off frequency is crucial in balancing robustness at high frequencies and performance at low frequencies. First, the maximum stability interval in parameter $T$ is determined, with $T$ the inverse of the filter's cutoff frequency. Next, model mismatch on the PDE parameters is considered and a sufficient stability condition is derived in terms of allowable mismatch and cut-off frequency, satisfied in a region in the combined parameter space with a conic shape around $T=0$. Finally, this qualitative behavior is confirmed by exact stability charts for a special case where all model mismatch is contained into one parameter. It is highlighted that the set of stability crossing curves exhibits a fractal-like structure, which is explained using a limit system with discrete delays.

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arXiv2025

Backstepping for Partial Differential Equations:A Survey

Systems modeled by partial differential equations (PDEs) are at least as ubiquitous as systems that are by nature finite-dimensional and modeled by ordinary differential equations (ODEs). And yet, systematic and readily usable methodologies, for such a significant portion of real systems, have been historically scarce. Around the year 2000, the backstepping approach to PDE control began to offer not only a less abstract alternative to PDE control techniques replicating optimal and spectrum assignment techniques of the 1960s, but also enabled the methodologies of adaptive and nonlinear control, matured in the 1980s and 1990s, to be extended from ODEs to PDEs, allowing feedback synthesis for physical and engineering systems that are uncertain, nonlinear, and infinite-dimensional. The PDE backstepping literature has grown in its nearly a quarter century of development to many hundreds of papers and nearly a dozen books. This survey aims to facilitate the entry, for a new researcher, into this thriving area of overwhelming size and topical diversity. Designs of controllers and observers, for parabolic, hyperbolic, and other classes of PDEs, in one and more dimensions (in box and spherical geometries), with nonlinear, adaptive, sampled-data, and event-triggered extensions, are covered in the survey. The lifeblood of control are technology and physics. The survey places a particular emphasis on applications that have motivated the development of the theory and which have benefited from the theory and designs: applications involving flows, flexible structures, materials, thermal and chemically reacting dynamics, energy (from oil drilling to batteries and magnetic confinement fusions), and vehicles.

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