Preview Reference Governors: A Constraint Management Technique for Systems With Preview Information

Abstract

This paper presents a constraint management strategy based on Scalar Reference Governors (SRG) to enforce output, state, and control constraints while taking into account the preview information of the reference and/or disturbances signals.The strategy, referred to as the Preview Reference Governor (PRG), can outperform SRG while maintaining the highlyattractive computational benefits of SRG. However, as it is shown, the performance of PRG may suffer if large preview horizons are used. An extension of PRG, referred to as Multi-horizon PRG, is proposed to remedy this issue. Quantitative comparisons between SRG, PRG, and Multi-horizon PRG on a one-link robot arm example are presented to illustrate their performance and computation time. Furthermore, extensions of PRG are presented to handle systems with disturbance preview and multi-input systems. The robustness of PRG to parametric uncertainties and inaccurate preview information is also explored.