Bang-bang solution of nonlinear time-optimal control problems using a semi-exhaustive search

At times, the objective is to seek a bang-bang control policy for nonlinear time-optimal control problems. The usefulness of iterative dynamic program ming (IDP) has been shown in the literature for solving such problems. Howe ver, the convergence to the optimal solution has been obtained from about 5 0% of the guessed values near the optimum. In this paper, we present a semi exhaustive search method for seeking such solutions and a comparison is mad e with the IDP. The results show that the convergence can be obtained from a significantly higher number of guessed values chosen over a much wider re gion around the optimum.