Exact Instability Radius of Discrete-Time LTI Systems

Abstract: The robust instability of an unstable plant subject to stable perturbations is of significant importance and arises in the study of sustained oscillatory phenomena in nonlinear systems. This paper analyzes the robust instability of linear discrete-time systems against stable perturbations via the notion of robust instability radius (RIR) as a measure of instability. We determine the exact RIR for certain unstable systems using small-gain type conditions by formulating the problem in terms of a phase change rate maximization subject to appropriate constraints at unique peak-gain frequencies, for which stable first-order all-pass functions are shown to be optimal. Two real-world applications -- minimum-effort sampled-data control of magnetic levitation systems and neural spike generations in the FitzHugh--Nagumo model subject to perturbations -- are provided to illustrate the utility of our results.