Backstepping design for incremental stability

Stability is arguably one of the core concepts upon which our understanding of dynamical and control systems has been built. The related notion of incremental stability, however, has received much less attention until recently, when it was successfully used as a tool for the analysis and design of intrinsic observers, output regulation of nonlinear systems, frequency estimators, synchronization of coupled identical dynamical systems, symbolic models for nonlinear control systems, and bio-molecular systems. However, most of the existing controller design techniques provide controllers enforcing stability rather than incremental stability. Hence, there is a growing need to extend existing methods or develop new ones for the purpose of designing incrementally stabilizing controllers. In this paper, we develop a backstepping design approach for incremental stability. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by synthesizing a controller rendering a synchronous generator incrementally stable.