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 highly-attractive 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.