Nonholonomic directional pursuit and evasion: Global feedbacks

Bo Wang; Miroslav Krstic

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2606.21742

Nonholonomic directional pursuit and evasion: Global feedbacks

Bo Wang·Miroslav Krstic

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

In a recent paper by the second coauthor, directional pursuit-evasion for strictly forward-moving nonholonomic vehicles was solved "half-globally", namely under favorable initial line-of-sight conditions. In this paper, we develop feedback designs that achieve the directional pursuit and evasion objectives from arbitrary initial relative configurations. We achieve globality with completely different approaches to both the design and the analysis. Our designs are less aggressive in both the forward-speed and steering laws, allowing transient overshoot of the pursuer-evader range during global reorientation. The only price that we pay for globality is that our feedback laws require a priori knowledge of the opponent's maximal turning rate, whereas in the half-global work, no known bound of the opponent's turning rate was assumed. For the pursuit problem, the feedback law guarantees finite-time capture with prescribed directional alignment. For the evasion problem, the feedback law guarantees capture avoidance with a prescribed safety margin and achieves spinaway under a decay condition on the pursuer's turning rate. We illustrate the global capture and spinaway with simulations. The analysis is based on an integral input-to-state stability type mechanism induced by an endogenous time dilation, together with finite-time coextinction and safety-margin persistence lemmas for singularly coupled scalar inequalities.

Explore related subjects

eess.SY cs.SY

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Bo Wang, Miroslav Krstic. 2026-06-19. Nonholonomic directional pursuit and evasion: Global feedbacks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21742

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Constrained Feedback Control of Nonlinear Systems via Approximate HJB and Control Barrier Functions

This paper presents a two-stage framework for constrained feedback control of input-affine nonlinear systems. Offline, an approximate value function for the unconstrained problem is computed, for example using Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB)-based policy iteration. Online, the proposed quadratic program (QP) minimizes the pre-Hamiltonian evaluated using the approximate value-function gradient subject to safety constraints enforced by control barrier functions (CBFs). This architecture decouples performance optimization from constraint enforcement, allowing constraints to be modified without recomputing the value function. As in CBF-QP architectures based on control Lyapunov functions (CLFs), safety is enforced as a hard constraint; however, the performance objective targets approximate optimality rather than a prescribed Lyapunov decay. Numerical results on a linear 2-state hovercraft and a nonlinear 9-state spacecraft attitude-control problem show agreement with the constrained open-loop optimal control problem (OCP) benchmark in the linear case, and performance close to the OCP benchmark, improving on CLF-based controllers, in the nonlinear case.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Rao-Blackwellized Stein Gradient Descent for Joint State-Parameter Estimation

We present a filtering framework for online joint state estimation and parameter identification in nonlinear, time-varying systems. The algorithm uses a Rao-Blackwellization technique to infer joint state-parameter posteriors efficiently. In particular, conditional state distributions are computed analytically via Kalman filtering, while model parameters, including the measurement-noise covariance, are approximated using particle-based Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), enabling stable real-time inference. To handle parameters subject to physical constraints, we further introduce constrained variants that enforce them through an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) splitting of the SVGD update, including nonlinear equality constraints that standard particle filters cannot readily handle. We derive a stability bound that relates the approximation error in the parameter posterior to the resulting error in the marginal state distribution. Performance of the proposed filters is validated on three case studies: a fed-batch bioreactor with Haldane kinetics and a damped pendulum, both under physical constraints, and a neural-network-augmented dynamic system. The examples cover parameter estimation under inequality and equality constraints and online neural-network training within a dynamical model.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Firing Rate Neural Network Implementations of Model Predictive Control

Human and animal brains perform planning to enable complex movements and behaviors, a process that can be effectively described using model predictive control (MPC). How could the brain physically implement MPC? In this work, we translate model predictive controllers into firing rate neural networks, offering insights into the nonlinear neural dynamics that underpin planning. We propose a constructive method; no training is required. This is done first applying the projected gradient method to the dual problem to derive a baseline neural network implementation. We then use factorization and contraction analysis to systematically generate alternative network architectures; in other words, we systematically generate hypotheses for how planning is done in the brain via neural dynamics. Finally, we present numerical simulations to study different neural networks performing MPC to balance an inverted pendulum on a cart (i.e., balancing a stick on a hand), including one example in which imposing sparse connectivity (a property observed in brain networks) does not degrade control performance.

eess.SY↗