English

Input-to-State Stability in Probability

Systems and Control 2023-05-01 v1 Robotics Systems and Control

Abstract

Input-to-State Stability (ISS) is fundamental in mathematically quantifying how stability degrades in the presence of bounded disturbances. If a system is ISS, its trajectories will remain bounded, and will converge to a neighborhood of an equilibrium of the undisturbed system. This graceful degradation of stability in the presence of disturbances describes a variety of real-world control implementations. Despite its utility, this property requires the disturbance to be bounded and provides invariance and stability guarantees only with respect to this worst-case bound. In this work, we introduce the concept of ``ISS in probability (ISSp)'' which generalizes ISS to discrete-time systems subject to unbounded stochastic disturbances. Using tools from martingale theory, we provide Lyapunov conditions for a system to be exponentially ISSp, and connect ISSp to stochastic stability conditions found in literature. We exemplify the utility of this method through its application to a bipedal robot confronted with step heights sampled from a truncated Gaussian distribution.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.14578,
  title  = {Input-to-State Stability in Probability},
  author = {Preston Culbertson and Ryan K. Cosner and Maegan Tucker and Aaron D. Ames},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.14578},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:20:22.129Z