Under-Approximate Reachability Analysis for a Class of Linear Uncertain Systems

Under-approximations of reachable sets and tubes have received recent research attention due to their important roles in control synthesis and verification. Available under-approximation methods designed for continuous-time linear systems typically assume the ability to compute transition matrices and their integrals exactly, which is not feasible in general. In this note, we attempt to overcome this drawback for a class of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems, where we propose a novel method to under-approximate finite-time forward reachable sets and tubes utilizing approximations of the matrix exponential. In particular, we consider the class of continuous-time LTI systems with an identity input matrix and uncertain initial and input values belonging to full dimensional sets that are affine transformations of closed unit balls. The proposed method yields computationally efficient under-approximations of reachable sets and tubes with first order convergence guarantees in the sense of the Hausdorff distance. To illustrate its performance, the proposed method is implemented in three numerical examples, where linear systems of dimensions ranging between 2 and 200 are considered.