Homogeneity for control systems in discrete time

Homogeneity, as a generalization of linearity to nonlinear systems, has proven to be a very powerful in systems and control. Nevertheless, only recently a notion of homogeneity was proposed for discrete-time control systems. However, this so-called D-Homogeneity directly couples the stability behaviour with the degree of homogeneity—in contrast to the continuous-time case. As an alternative, we propose the notion of S-Homogeneity, which avoids this coupling. S-Homogeneity uses a state-dependent time step that is compatible with sampling and discretization in time. We show that this concept preserves a contraction property and null-controllability for state-dependent sampling. For fixed sampling time, it yields (practical/semi-global) null controllability for sufficiently fast sampling, depending on the degree of homogeneity.