Are uncontrollable modes with no real part stabilizable?
so this is a simple question regarding stabilizability.
When I want to know if a certain uncontrollable system is stabilizable, I need to find the uncontrollable modes (also known as poles, or eigenvalues) and see if they are in the left-half complex plane.
But I want to know about those modes that don't have a real part, so they lie over the axis, these are usually named marginally stable modes. How do this modes interact with stabilizability?
Thanks!
A state space model is called stabilizable if there exists some $u(t)$ such that,
$$ \lim_{t\to 0}x(t)=0\quad\forall\ x(0)\in \mathbb{R}^n. $$
So if $(A,B)$ has marginally stable modes, which are uncontrollable, then those modes can never die out and therefore $x(t)$ will not go to zero for all initial conditions. Such a system would therefore not be stabilizable.
In order words, using the Hautus test, $(A,B)$ is stabilizable if and only if,
$$ \text{rank}\left[\lambda\,I-A \quad B\right]=n \quad \forall \ \ \text{Re}(\lambda) \geq 0, $$
where you only need to fill in eigen values of $A$ for $\lambda$, since otherwise $\lambda\,I-A$ is already full rank.