Unlike the situation with gain and phase margins in robust stabilization, the problem to determine an exact maximum delay margin is still an open problem, although extensive work has been done to establish upper and lower bounds. The problem is that the corresponding constraints in the Nyquist plot are frequency dependent, and encircling the point <formula><tex>$s=-1$</tex></formula> has to be done at sufficiently low frequencies, as the possibility to do so closes at higher frequencies. In this paper we present a new method for determining a sharper lower bound by introducing a frequency-dependent shift. The problem of finding such a bound simultaneously with gain and phase margin constraints is also considered. In all these problems we take an analytic interpolation approach.

Function theory on the unit disc proved key to a range of problems in statistics, probability theory, signal processing literature, and applications, and in this, a special place is occupied by trigonometric functions and the Fejer-Riesz theorem that non-negative trigonometric polynomials can be expressed as the modulus of a polynomial of the same degree evaluated on the unit circle. In the present note we consider a natural generalization of non-negative trigonometric polynomials that are matrix-valued with specified non-trivial poles (i.e., other than at the origin or at infinity). We are interested in the corresponding spectral factors and, specifically, we show that the factorization of trigonometric polynomials can be carried out in complete analogy with the Fej ' er-Riesz theorem. The affinity of the factorization with the Fej ' er-Riesz theorem and the contrast to classical spectral factorization lies in the fact that the spectral factors have degree smaller than what standard construction in factorization theory would suggest. We provide two juxtaposed proofs of this fundamental theorem, albeit for the case of strict positivity, one that relies on analytic interpolation theory and another that utilizes classical factorization theory based on the Yacubovich-Popov-Kalman (YPK) positive-real lemma.

In this work we consider robust stabilization of uncertain dynamical systems and show that this can be achieved by solving a non-classically constrained analytic interpolation problem. In particular, this non-classical constraint confines the range of the interpolant, when evaluated on the imaginary axis, to a frequency-dependent set. By considering a sufficient condition for when this interpolation problem has a solution, we derive an approximate solution algorithm that can also be used for controller synthesis. The conservativeness of the method is reduced by introducing a shift, which can be tuned by the user. Finally, the theory is illustrated on a numerical example with a plant with uncertain gain, phase, and output delay.

Linear dynamical relations that may exist in continuous-time, or at some natural sampling rate, are not directly discernable at reduced observational sampling rates. Indeed, at reduced rates, matricial spectral densities of vectorial time series have maximal rank and thereby cannot be used to ascertain potential dynamic relations between their entries. This hitherto undeclared source of inaccuracies appears to plague off-the-shelf identification techniques seeking remedy in hypothetical observational noise. In this letter we explain the exact relation between stochastic models at different sampling rates and show how to construct stochastic models at the finest time scale that data allows. We then point out that the correct number of dynamical dependencies can only be ascertained by considering stochastic models at this finest time scale, which in general is faster than the observational sampling rate.

We study the delay margin problem in the context of recent works by T. Qi, J. Zhu, and J. Chen, where a sufficient condition for the maximal delay margin is formulated in terms of an interpolation problem obtained after introducing a rational approximation. Instead we omit the approximation step and solve the same problem directly using techniques from function theory and analytic interpolation. Furthermore, we introduce a constant shift in the domain of the interpolation problem. In this way we are able to improve on their lower bound for the maximum delay margin.

In our companion paper [A. Ringh, J. Karlsson, and A. Lindquist, SIAM T. Control Opton., 54 (2016), pp. 1950-1982] we discussed the multidimensional rational covariance extension problem (RCEP), which has important applications in image processing and spectral estimation in radar, sonar, and medical imaging. This is an inverse problem where a power spectrum with a rational absolutely continuous part is reconstructed from a finite set of moments. However, in most applications these moments are determined from observed data and are therefore only approximate, and the RCEP may not have a solution. In this paper we extend the results of our companion paper to handle approximate covariance matching. We consider two problems, one with a soft constraint and the other one with a hard constraint, and show that they are connected via a homeomorphism. We also demonstrate that the problems are well-posed and illustrate the theory by examples in spectral estimation and texture generation.

The rational covariance extension problem is a moment problem with several important applications in systems and control as, for example, in identification, estimation, and signal analysis. Here we consider the multidimensional counterpart and present new results for the well-posedness of the problem. We apply the theory to texture generation by modeling the texture as the output of a Wiener system. The static nonlinearity in the Wiener system is assumed to be a thresholding function and we identify both the linear dynamical system and the thresholding parameter.

^{I first met Rudolf Kalman in Vienna, Austria, in the spring of 1972. I had recently finished my Ph.D. at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, and I was invited to give a talk on my recent results in stochastic control theory at a small workshop that Kalman also attended. Apparently, Kalman was favorably impressed with my talk because he took me out for dinner the same evening and immediately invited me to come to Florida for the coming academic year. Kalman had just moved from Stanford to the University of Florida, and this is how I became his first postdoctoral associate at his new Center for Mathematical Systems Theory in the fall of 1972.}

We develop an approach to the spectral estimation that has been advocated by [ A. Ferrante et al., "Time and spectral domain relative entropy: A new approach to multivariate spectral estimation,"IEEE Trans. Autom. Control, vol. 57, no. 10, pp. 2561-2575, Oct. 2012.] and, in the context of the scalar-valued covariance extension problem, by [P. Enqvist and J. Karlsson, "Minimal itakurasaito distance and covariance interpolation," in Proc. 47th IEEE Conf. Decision Control, 2008, pp. 137-142]. The aim is to determine the power spectrum that is consistent with given moments and minimizes the relative entropy between the probability law of the underlying Gaussian stochastic process to that of a prior. The approach is analogous to the framework of earlier work by Byrnes, Georgiou, and Lindquist and can also be viewed as a generalization of the classical work by Burg and Jaynes on the maximum entropy method. In this paper, we present a new fast algorithm in the general case (i.e., for general Gaussian priors) and show that for priors with a specific structure the solution can be given in closed form.

We consider data fusion for the purpose of smoothing and interpolation based on observation records with missing data. Stochastic processes are generated by linear stochastic models. The paper begins by drawing a connection between time reversal in stochastic systems and all-pass extensions. A particular normalization (choice of basis) between the two time-directions allows the two to share the same orthonormalized state process and simplifies the mathematics of data fusion. In this framework, we derive symmetric and balanced Mayne-Fraser-like formulas that apply simultaneously to continuous-time smoothing and interpolation, providing a definitive unification of these concepts. The absence of data over subintervals requires in general a hybrid filtering approach involving both continuous-time and discrete-time filtering steps.