Guaranteed Set-point Computation with Application to the Control of a Sailboat

The problem of characterizing in a guaranteed way the set of all feasible set-points of a control problem is known to be difficult. In the present work, the problem to be solved involves non-linear equality constraints with variables affected by logical quantifiers. This problem is not solvable by current symbolic methods like quantifier elimination, which is commonly used for solving this class of problems. We propose the utilization of guaranteed set-computation techniques based on interval analysis, in particular a solver referred to as Quantified Set Inversion (QSI). As an application example, the problem of simultaneously controlling the speed and the orientation of a sailboat is presented. For this purpose, the combination of QSI solver and feedback linearization techniques is employed.