Reference and command governors: A tutorial on their theory and automotive applications

This paper provides a tutorial overview of reference governors and command governors, which are add-on control schemes for reference supervision and constraint enforcement in closed-loop feedback control systems. The main approaches to the development of such schemes for linear and nonlinear systems are described. The treatment of unmeasured disturbances and parametric uncertainties is addressed. Generalizations to extended command governors, feedforward reference governors, reduced order reference governors, parameter governors, networked reference governors, decentralized reference governors, and virtual state governors are summarized. Examples of applications of these techniques to automotive systems are given. A comprehensive list of references is included. Comments comparing reference and command governor approaches with Model Predictive Control and input shaping, and on future directions in reference and command governor research are included.