Dynamically Feasible Planning and Control in Complex Environments: a Scalable Systematic Approach

Abstract

In this article we present a method to generate safe sets for linear discrete-time systems subject to non-convex constraints that can be represented as a union of polytopes. It is then shown how a reference governor can be implemented for safe reference tracking tasks. A theoretical analysis of the safe set is presented and properties of the reference governor scheme are derived. The guarantees include safety at any time as well as finite-time convergence of the applied reference command to any strictly admissible reference command. For the proposed reference governor, online computational overhead is low. Moreover, it is shown that for specific instances of the complex constraint sets, the safe set can be computed efficiently. Extensive simulation results demonstrating the applicability of the method and online/offline computation times are reported.