Safety control of piece-wise continuous order preserving systems

Abstract

This paper is concerned with safety control of systems with imperfect state information and disturbance input. Specifically, we consider the class of systems whose dynamics preserve a partial ordering. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which a given set of initial states is steerable away from a specified bad set. Moreover, a control strategy is provided that guarantees that the bad set is avoided. Such characterization is achieved for order preserving systems while for general systems only an approximated solution is achievable. A method for implementation of the control strategy is provided and the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated via a numerical example and employed for obstacle avoidance of a ship.