Extending and Unifying the Fundamental Tasks of Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability Analysis

Abstract

In this work, we introduce the generalized reach-avoid (GRA) task, which both extends and unifies the canonical tasks of Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability (HJR). We show that the GRA not only serves as a common primitive in this class of fundamental tasks, but also strictly extends the fundamental tasks that can be solved with HJR. Moreover, the GRA formulation enables one to compute the value functions of certain composite tasks, including ones from timed temporal logic, by decomposing the value function of the composite task into value functions of GRA tasks. We additionally show that the GRA is also a natural primitive to consider from a PDE perspective, as it can be used to represent all sufficiently regular solutions of the HJ-PDE that is canonical to HJR. Collectively, the results in this work show the theoretical and practical utility of this task within the increasingly important framework of HJR.