A generalized reference governor for nonlinear systems

Reference governors are auxiliary systems that accept and, when needed, modify input commands to enforce pointwise-in-time state and control constraints. This paper proposes a new approach to reference governor design for nonlinear systems with unmeasured disturbance inputs. The approach relies on safety properties provided by sublevel sets of equilibria-parametrized functions. Unlike the prior literature, however, these functions need not be Lyapunov functions and the corresponding sublevel sets need not be positively invariant. Furthermore, the equilibria-parametrized functions need not be smooth, only continuous.