A characterization of normal forms for control systems

The study of the behavior of solutions of ODEs often benefits from deciding on a convenient choice of coordinates. This choice of coordinates may be used to "simplify" the functional expressions that appear in the vector field in order that the essential features of the flow of the ODE near a critical point become more evident. In the case of the analysis of an ordinary differential equation in the neighborhood of an equilibrium point, this naturally leads to the consideration of the possibility to remove the maximum number of terms in the Taylor expansion of the vector field up to a given order. This idea was introduced by H. Poincaré and the "simplified" system is called normal form. On another side, even though in many textbook treatments the emphasis is on the reduction of the number of monomials in the Taylor expansion, one of the main reasons for the success of normal forms lies in the fact that it allows to analyze a dynamical system based on a simpler form and a simpler form doesn't necessarily mean to remove the maximum number of terms in the Taylor series expansion. This observation, led to introduce the so-called "inner-product normal forms". They are based on properly choosing an inner product that allows to simplify the computations. This inner-product will characterize the space overwhich one performs the Taylor series expansion. The elements in this space are the ones that characterize the normal form. Our goal in this paper is to generalize such an approach to control systems.