Stability of extremum seeking for maps that are strictly but not strongly convex

Abstract

For a map that is strictly but not strongly convex, model-based gradient extremum seeking has an eigenvalue of zero at the extremum, i.e., it fails at exponential convergence. Interestingly, perturbation-based model-free extremum seeking has a negative Jacobian, in the average, meaning that its (practical) convergence is exponential, even though the map’s Hessian is zero at the extremum. Although these observations for gradient-based extremum seeking control (GESC) are not trivial, in this paper we focus on an even more nontrivial study of the same phenomenon for Newton-based extremum seeking control (NESC). NESC is a second-order method which corrects for the unknown Hessian of the unknown map, not only in order to speed up parameter convergence, but also (1) to make the convergence rate user-assignable in spite of the unknown Hessian, and (2) to equalize the convergence rates in different directions for multivariable maps. Previous NESC work established stability only for maps whose Hessians are strictly positive definite everywhere, so the Hessian is invertible everywhere. For a scalar map, we establish the rather unexpected property that, even when the map is strictly convex but not strongly convex, i.e., when the Hessian may be zero, NESC guarantees practical asymptotic stability, semiglobally. While a model-based Newton-based algorithm would run into non-invertibility of the Hessian, the perturbation-based NESC, surprisingly, avoids this challenge by leveraging the fact that the average of the perturbation-based Hessian estimate is always positive, even though the actual Hessian may be zero. However, these stability results for the NESC, and even for the GESC, do not hold for multivariable maps. We show that these ESCs can be locally destabilized for certain symmetric maps by highly asymmetric dither choices. Thus, we present unexpected robustness of NESC on maps that are scalar and strictly but not necessarily strongly convex.