The Explicit Reference Governor: A General Framework for the Closed-Form Control of Constrained Nonlinear Systems

The systematic design of control laws for nonlinear systems subject to state and input constraints is one of the major challenges in the control of realworld systems. Depending on the application, the desired solution must achieve a satisfactory tradeoff between multiple and often contradicting requirements such as optimality, computational efficiency, robustness, reliability, tuning simplicity, and generality. This article proposes a novel framework for the closed-form control of nonlinear systems subject to constraints on the state and input variables. The proposed strategy differs from most existing methods because it systematically handles both state and input constraints without making use of online optimization.