A Feasible-Velocity Framework for Local Controllability of Nonlinear Systems with Zero-Excluding Input Constraints

Abstract

This paper studies local controllability of nonlinear control-affine systems subject to state-dependent box constraints that strictly exclude the zero input. Such constraints arise naturally in cable-driven robots and other systems with strictly positive actuation, but fall outside classical small-time local controllability theory and existing frameworks for positive or cone-constrained controls. We introduce the admissible balancing set, an input-space object that classifies reference states without requiring the control distribution to have full rank. When an admissible balancing input lies in the interior of the input set, a locally uniform input shift recovers a symmetric-control system, allowing classical accessibility and small-time local controllability criteria to be applied. When no admissible balancing input exists, the feasible-velocity set is strictly separated from the origin. We show that the resulting separating covector defines a local barrier functional that increases at a uniform positive rate along every admissible trajectory, thereby providing a quantitative obstruction to small-time local controllability. This obstruction does not exclude finite-time reachability through trajectories leaving the barrier neighborhood, which motivates the notion of admissible excursions. The framework is illustrated on an underactuated planar cable-driven parallel robot, for which the barrier is certified numerically over a prescribed state neighborhood.