Results on Incremental Stability for a Class of Hybrid Systems

Incremental stability is the notion that the distance between every pair of solutions to the system has stable behavior and approaches zero asymptotically. This paper introduces this notion for a class of hybrid systems. In particular, we define incremental stability as well as incremental partial stability, and study their properties. The approach used to derive our results consists of recasting the incremental stability problem as a set stabilization problem, for which the tools for asymptotic stability of hybrid systems are applicable. In particular, we propose an auxiliary hybrid system to study the stability of the diagonal set, which relates to incremental stability of the original system. The proposed notions are illustrated in examples throughout the paper.