The reachable sets of nonlinear systems are usually quite complicated. They, as a rule, are non-convex and arranged to have rather complex behavior. In this paper, the asymptotic behavior of reachable sets of nonlinear control-affine systems on small time intervals is studied. We assume that the initial state of the system is fixed, and the control is bounded in the (mathbb{L}_2)-norm. The subject of the study is the applicability of the linearization method for a sufficiently small length of the time interval. We provide sufficient conditions under which the reachable set of a nonlinear system is convex and asymptotically equal to the reachable set of a linearized system. The concept of asymptotic equality is defined in terms of the Banach-Mazur metric in the space of sets. The conditions depend on the behavior of the controllability Gramian of the linearized system – the smallest eigenvalue of the Gramian should not tend to zero too quickly when the length of the time interval tends to zero. The indicated asymptotic behavior occurs for a reasonably wide class of second-order nonlinear control systems but can be violated for systems of higher dimension. The results of numerical simulation illustrate the theoretical conclusions of the paper.
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