Minimal Time Problems with Moving Targets and Obstacles

We consider minimal time problems governed by nonlinear systems under general time dependent state constraints and in the twoplayer games setting. In general, it is known that the characterization of the minimal time function, as well as the study of its regularity properties, is a difficult task in particular when no controllability assumption is made. In addition to these difficulties, we are interested here to the case when the target, the state constraints and the dynamics are allowed to be time-dependent. We introduce a particular ”reachability” control problem, which has a supremum cost function but is free of state constraints. This auxiliary control problem allows to characterize easily the backward reachable sets, and then, the minimal time function, without assuming any controllability assumption. These techniques are linked to the well known level-set approaches. Partial results of the study have been published recently by the authors in SICON. Here, we generalize the method to more complex problems of moving target and obstacle problems. Our results can be used to deal with motion planning problems with obstacle avoidance.