Stochastic piecewise affine control with application to pitch control of helicopter

In this paper, at first the stability condition which gives an upper stochastic bound for a class of Stochastic Hybrid Systems (SHS) with deterministic jumps is derived. Here, additive noise signals are considered that do not vanish at equilibrium points. The presented theorem gives an upper bound for the second stochastic moment or variance of the system trajectories. Then, the linear case of SHS is investigated to show the application of the theorem. For the linear case of such stochastic hybrid systems, the stability criterion is obtained in terms of Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) and an upper bound on state covariance is obtained for them. Then utilizing the stability theorem, an output feedback controller design procedure is proposed which requires the Bilinear Matrix Inequalities (BMI) to be solved. Next, the pitch dynamics of a helicopter is approximated with a set of linear stochastic systems, and the proposed controller is designed for the approximated model and implemented on the main nonlinear system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed theorem and the control design method.