A contraction theory approach to stochastic incremental stability

Abstract : We investigate the incremental stability properties of Itô stochastic dynamical systems. Specifically, we derive a stochastic version of nonlinear contraction theory that provides a bound on the mean square distance between any two trajectories of a stochastically contracting system. This bound can be expressed as a function of the noise intensity and the contraction rate of the noise-free system. We illustrate these results in the contexts of stochastic nonlinear observers design and stochastic synchronization.