Inner-Loop Reference Governor Design with an Application to Human-in-the-Loop Control

Abstract

This paper presents a novel reference-governor-based approach to enforcing constraints in open-loop systems, where the constraint enforcement scheme modifies a control signal from a feedback controller. The reference governor is not typically applicable to these systems, since reference governors modify reference signals, which are inputs to a feedback controller.The design is based on duplicating the feedback controller of the closed-loop system and implementing a reference governor to modify the reference input to the duplicate controller. Effectively, this bypasses the nominal controller, whose internal dynamics may not be asymptotically stable. We present a method to ensure stability of the closed-loop system by ceding some control authority to the nominal controller.A numerical example is considered in which the nominal controller is a human operator of a steer-by-wire system. The operator is modeled as a PID controller with unknown parameters. Results show that the inner-loop governor design is able to satisfactorily enforce constraints in such an application.