Output regulation of linear plants subject to constraints

Output regulation problems for continuous-time linear systems with state and/or input constraints are studied. The problems are formulated in global and semi-global setting by using state or full information feedback. The goal of this paper is to develop solvability conditions for the posed problems. Moreover, appropriate regulators are constructed under the solvability conditions. To state the solvability conditions clearly, a taxonomy of constraints is introduced which delineates the constraints into several categories. Such a taxonomy of constraints provides a classification of linear plants with constraints and identifies what types of output regulation problems are solvable. Results developed here include as a special case the results obtained in the literature for systems with only input constraints. The constraint taxonomy also identifies some intrinsically hard constraints (non-right invertible constraints) for which the solvability conditions of global/semi-global output regulation problems are not clear yet. As a special case of output regulation, we also consider tracking problems with constraints. It is shown that if there exists a state feedback controller with a stabilizing domain of attraction, then one can find a regulator with a tracking domain of attraction arbitrarily close to the stabilizing domain.