TY - JOUR AB - The persistence of excitation of signals generated by time-invariant, autonomous, linear, and nonlinear systems is studied using a geometric approach. A rank condition is shown to be equivalent, under certain assumptions, to the persistence of excitation of the solutions of the class of systems considered, both in the discrete-time and in the continuous-time settings. The rank condition is geometric in nature and can be checked a priori, i.e. without knowing explicitly the solutions of the system, for almost periodic systems. The significance of the ideas and tools presented is illustrated by means of simple examples. Applications to model reduction from input-output data and stability analysis of skew-symmetric systems are also discussed. AU - Padoan,A AU - Scarciotti,G AU - Astolfi,A DO - 10.1109/TAC.2017.2687760 EP - 5677 PY - 2017/// SN - 0018-9286 SP - 5666 TI - A geometric characterization of the persistence of excitation condition for the solutions of autonomous systems T2 - IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TAC.2017.2687760 UR - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7902166 UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/38987 VL - 62 ER -