Control of chaos in excitable physiological systems: A geometric analysis

Model-independent chaos control techniques are inherently well-suited for the control of physiological systems for which quantitative system models are unavailable. The proportional perturbation feedback (PPF) control paradigm, which uses electrical stimulation to perturb directly the controlled system variable (e.g., the interbeat or interspike interval), was developed for excitable physiological systems that do not have an easily accessible system parameter. We develop the stable manifold placement (SMP) technique, a PPF-type technique which is simpler and more robust than the original PPF control algorithm. We use the SMP technique to control a simple geometric model of a chaotic system in the neighborhood of an unstable periodic orbit (UPO). We show that while the SMP technique can control a chaotic system that has UPO dynamics which are characterized by one stable manifold and one unstable manifold, the success of the SMP technique is sensitive to UPO parameter estimation errors.