A Constraint Programming Approach for Polytopic Simulation of Ordinary Differential Equations — A Collision Detection Application

This paper presents a constraint-based approach to compute the reachable tube of nonlinear differentiable equations. A set of initial values for the equations is considered and defined by a polytope represented as intersections of zonotopes. Guaranteed numerical integration based on zonotopic computation is used to compute reachable tubes. In order to efficiently build polytopes defined by the intersection of several zonotopes, we use a previously developed abstract domain [27] to represent reachable tubes. The proposed contribution allows to compute more expressive reachable tubes more efficiently than methods based only on boxes, and therefore could improve verification/validation processes in robotics application for example. The approach is evaluated on examples taken from literature and we present two applications of this work.