Intrinsic and Apparent Singularities in Flat Differential Systems

Abstract: In this paper, we study the singularities of locally flat systems, motivated by the solution, if it exists, of the global motion planning problem for such systems, in the spirit of \cite{CE_14}. More precisely, flat outputs may be only locally defined because of the existence of points where they are singular (a notion that will be made clear later), thus preventing from planning trajectories crossing these points. Such points are of different types. Some of them can be easily ruled out by considering another non singular flat output, defined on an open set intersecting the domain of the former one and well defined at the point in question. However, it might happen that no well-defined flat outputs exist at all at some points. We call these points \emph{intrinsic} singularities and the other ones \emph{apparent}. A rigorous defintion of these points is introduced in terms of atlas and charts in the framework of the differential geometry of jets of infinite order and Lie-B\"acklund isomorphisms (see \cite{FLMR_99,Levine-09}). We then give a criterion allowing to effectively compute intrinsic singularities. Finally, we show how our results apply to global motion planning of the well-known example of non holonomic car.