Further results on Lyapunov-like conditions of forward invariance and boundedness for a class of unstable systems

We provide several characterizations of convergence to unstable equilibria in nonlinear systems. Our current contribution is three-fold. First we present simple algebraic conditions for establishing local convergence of non-trivial solutions of nonlinear systems to unstable equilibria. The conditions are based on the earlier work [1] and can be viewed as an extension of the Lyapunov's first method in that they apply to systems in which the corresponding Jacobian has one zero eigenvalue. Second, we show that for a relevant subclass of systems, persistency of excitation of a function of time in the right-hand side of the equations governing dynamics of the system ensure existence of an attractor basin such that solutions passing through this basin in forward time converge to the origin exponentially. Finally we demonstrate that conditions developed in [1] may be remarkably tight.