Safety-Constrained Control of Nonlinear Mobility Systems Using Reference Governor

Ensuring safe operation and reliable control of mobility systems remains a significant challenge, particularly for nonlinear and high-dimensional applications subject to external disturbances with hard constraints and limited computational resources in real-time implementations. A reference governor (RG) can enforce constraints using an add-on scheme that preserves the pre-stabilizing controller while balancing the need to satisfy other requirements, including reference tracking and disturbance rejection. Thus, in this paper, we exploit RG-based strategies focusing on nonlinear mobility systems. While the method is generalizable to other applications, such as waypoint following for autonomous driving, the flight dynamics of a quadrotor system with twelve states are used as an example. We implement a disturbance rejection RG to satisfy safety constraints and track set points. To handle nonlinearity, we propose an optimal strategy to quantify the maximum deviation between the nonlinear plant and the linearized prediction model, which are then incorporated into the RG’s disturbance bounds for safety margins. Simulation results demonstrate that the RG guarantees the satisfaction of constraints while maintaining desirable tracking performance and being computationally feasible. Furthermore, the framework effectively mitigates the impact of disturbances, thereby enhancing system robustness. The findings confirm that the RG can be successfully applied to complex nonlinear aerial vehicles, providing a promising solution for the extensions to other safety-critical mobility applications.