Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have been recently utilized in the design of provably safe feedback control laws for nonlinear systems. These feedback control methods typically compute the next control input by solving an online Quadratic Program (QP). Solving QP in real-time can be a computationally expensive process for resource constraint systems. In this work, we propose to use imitation learning to learn Neural Network-based feedback controllers which will satisfy the CBF constraints. In the process, we also develop a new class of High Order CBF for systems under external disturbances. We demonstrate the framework on a unicycle model subject to external disturbances, e.g., wind or currents.
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Google AI Princeton（谷歌人工智能普林斯顿分部）
We consider the problem of generating maximally adversarial disturbances for a given controller assuming only blackbox access to it. We propose an online learning approach to this problem that \emph{adaptively} generates disturbances based on control inputs chosen by the controller. The goal of the disturbance generator is to minimize \emph{regret} versus a benchmark disturbance-generating policy class, i.e., to maximize the cost incurred by the controller as well as possible compared to the best possible disturbance generator \emph{in hindsight} (chosen from a benchmark policy class). In the …
This paper studies the control of safety-critical dynamical systems in the presence of adversarial disturbances. We seek to synthesize state-feedback controllers to minimize a cost incurred due to the disturbance, while respecting a safety constraint. The safety constraint is given by a bound on an H-inf norm, while the cost is specified as an upper bound on the H-2 norm of the system. We consider an online setting where costs at each time are revealed only after the controller at that time is chosen. We propose an iterative approach to the synthesis of the controller by solving a modified dis…
In this paper, we study mixed traffic systems that move along a single-lane ring-road or open-road. The traffic flow forms a platoon, which includes a number of heterogeneous human-driven vehicles (HDVs) together with only one connected and automated vehicle (CAV) that receives information from several neighbors. The dynamics of HDVs are assumed to follow the optimal velocity model (OVM), and the acceleration of the single CAV is directly controlled by a dynamical output-feedback controller. The ultimate goal of this work is to present a robust control strategy that can smoothen the traffic fl…
Robust global stabilization of nonlinear systems by observer-based feedback controllers is a challenging task. This article investigates the problem of designing observer-based stabilizing controllers for incrementally quadratic nonlinear systems with external disturbances. The nonlinearities considered in the system model satisfy the incremental quadratic constraints, which are characterized by incremental multiplier matrices and encompass many common nonlinearities. The simultaneous search for the observer and the controller gain matrices is formulated as a feasibility problem of linear matr…
In this work we consider the online control of a known linear dynamic system with adversarial disturbance and adversarial controller cost. The goal in online control is to minimize the regret, defined as the difference between cumulative cost over a period $T$ and the cumulative cost for the best policy from a comparator class. For the setting we consider, we generalize the previously proposed online Disturbance Response Controller (DRC) to the adaptive gradient online Disturbance Response Controller. Using the modified controller, we present novel regret guarantees that improves the establish…
This paper presents a strategy for control of a spacecraft docking with a non-maneuvering target in the presence of safety constraints and bounded disturbances. The presence of disturbances prevents convergence to a unique docking state, so in our formulation, docking is defined as occurring within a set constructed using prescribed tolerances. Safety is ensured via application of Robust Control Barrier Functions to render a designated safe set forward invariant for any allowable disturbance. However, this safety strategy necessarily presumes a worst-case disturbance, and thus restricts trajec…
Inspired by online learning, data-dependent regret has recently been proposed as a criterion for controller design. In the regret-optimal control paradigm, causal controllers are designed to minimize regret against a hypothetical optimal noncausal controller, which selects the globally cost-minimizing sequence of control actions given noncausal access to the disturbance sequence. We extend regret-optimal control to the more challenging measurement-feedback setting, where the online controller must compete against the optimal noncausal controller without directly observing the state or the driv…
Decentralized Disturbance Accommodation with Limited Plant Model Information
ACCESS Linnaeus Center, School of Electrical Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（ACCESS林奈中心，电气工程学院，皇家理工学院）；Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（航空航天工程系，伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
We propose a tracking control law for the fully actuated rigid body system in the presence of any unknown constant disturbance by employing quaternions with the stable embedding technique and Lyapunov stability theory. The stable embedding technique extends the attitude dynamics from the set of unit quaternions to the set of quaternions, which is a Euclidean space, such that the set of unit quaternions is an invariant set of the extended dynamics. Such a stable extension of the system dynamics to a Euclidean space allows us to employ well studied Lyapunov techniques in Euclidean spaces such as…
We construct two error feedback controllers for robust output tracking and disturbance rejection of a regular linear system with nonsmooth reference and disturbance signals. We show that for sufficiently smooth signals the output converges to the reference at a rate that depends on the behaviour of the transfer function of the plant on the imaginary axis. In addition, we construct a controller that can be designed to achieve robustness with respect to a given class of uncertainties in the system, and present a novel controller structure for output tracking and disturbance rejection without the…
We consider controller design for robust output tracking and disturbance rejection for continuous-time periodic linear systems with periodic reference and disturbance signals. As our main results we present four different controllers: A feedforward control law and a discrete-time dynamic error feedback controller for output tracking and disturbance rejection, a robust discrete-time feedback controller, and finally a discrete-time feedback controller that achieves approximate robust output tracking and disturbance rejection. The presented constructions are also new for time-invariant finite and…
This paper addresses modeling and control of a six-degree-of-freedom unmanned aerial vehicle capable of vertical take-off and landing in the presence of wind disturbances. We design a hybrid vehicle that combines the benefits of both the fixed-wing and the rotary-wing UAVs. A non-linear model for the hybrid vehicle is rapidly built, combining rigid body dynamics, aerodynamics of wing, and dynamics of the motor and propeller. Further, we design an H2 optimal controller to make the UAV robust to wind disturbances. We compare its results against that of PID and LQR-based control. Our proposed con…
The formal analysis and design of control systems is one of recent trends in control theory. In this area, in order to reduce the complexity and scale of control systems, finite abstractions of control systems are introduced and explored. In non-disturbance case, the controller of control systems is often generated from the controller of finite abstractions. Recently, Pola and Tabuada provide approximate finite abstractions for linear control systems with disturbance inputs. However, these finite abstractions and original linear systems do not always share the identical specifications, which o…
The conceptually new approach based on the logarithmic norm to design of robust adaptive state-feedback controller for linear time-varying (LTV) systems under system's modeling uncertainty and nonlinear external disturbance is proposed. This controller, consisting of two independent parts - adaptive and robust ones - globally asymptotically stabilizes every LTV system regardless how large the disturbance is.
In this work we address the problem of the online robust control of nonlinear dynamical systems perturbed by disturbance. We study the problem of attenuation of the total cost over a duration $T$ in response to the disturbances. We consider the setting where the cost function (at a particular time) is a general continuous function and adversarial, the disturbance is adversarial and bounded at any point of time. Our goal is to design a controller that can learn and adapt to achieve a certain level of attenuation. We analyse two cases (i) when the system is known and (ii) when the system is unkn…
In this paper, we are concerned with the stabilization of linear port-Hamiltonian systems of arbitrary order $N \in \mathbb{N}$ on a bounded $1$-dimensional spatial domain $(a,b)$. In order to achieve stabilization, we couple the system to a dynamic boundary controller, that is, a controller that acts on the system only via the boundary points $a,b$ of the spatial domain. We use a nonlinear controller in order to capture the nonlinear behavior that realistic actuators often exhibit and, moreover, we allow the output of the controller to be corrupted by actuator disturbances before it is fed ba…
Optimal Universal Controllers for Roll Stabilization
Oceaneering AGV Systems B.V.（Oceaneering AGV系统有限公司）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）；Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；Institute for Problems of Mechanical Engineering（机械工程学院问题研究所）
Recently developed control methods with strong disturbance rejection capabilities provide a useful option for control design. The key lies in a general concept of disturbance and effective ways to estimate and compensate the disturbance. This work extends the concept of disturbance as the mismatch between a system model and the true dynamics, and estimates and compensates the disturbance for multi-input multi-output linear/nonlinear systems described in a general form. The results presented do not need to assume the disturbance to be independent of the control inputs or satisfy a certain match…
In this study, we will present the design of a linear DC motor controller by projective linear qudratic servo feedback (P-LQSF) and analyze its stability through the notion of input to state stability theory. The projective control approach allows one to design an output feedback controller which approximates the eigenspectrum of a full state feedback closed loop. The performance and stability of the controllers will be analyzed both theoretically and through simulation. Apart from basic linear stability, the theoretical analysis will involve the stability of the closed loop against the distur…
This paper is concerned with mismatched disturbance rejection control for the second-order discrete-time systems.Different from previous work, the controllability of the system is applied to design the disturbance compensation gain, which does not require any coordinate transformations. Via this new idea, it is shown that disturbance in the regulated output is immediately and directly compensated in the case that the disturbance is known. When the disturbance is unknown, an extra generalized extended state observer is applied to design the controller. Two examples are given to show the effecti…
We study robust output regulation for parabolic partial differential equations and other infinite-dimensional linear systems with analytic semigroups. As our main results we show that robust output tracking and disturbance rejection for our class of systems can be achieved using a finite-dimensional controller and present algorithms for construction of two different internal model based robust controllers. The controller parameters are chosen based on a Galerkin approximation of the original PDE system and employ balanced truncation to reduce the orders of the controllers. In the second part o…
This paper focuses on the consensus and formation problems of multiagent systems under unknown persistent disturbances. Specifically, we propose a novel method that combines an existing consensus (or formation) algorithm with a new controller. The new controller has an integral action that produces a control input based on an error signal locally projected onto the column space of the graph Laplacian. This action allows agents to achieve a consensus or a predetermined formation objective under constant or time-varying disturbances. This study has analyzed the stability properties of this archi…
In this paper, two classes of continuous higher order adaptive sliding mode controllers based on barrier functions are developed for a perturbed chain of integrators with unbounded perturbations. Both classes provide finite-time convergence of system states to a predefined domain using a continuous control signal. The first class of adaptive controllers does not require any assumptions about the perturbation; however, it can provide unbounded control gains. To ensure bounded control gains, and in the case of a Lipschitz perturbation, a second class of adaptive controllers, called the adaptive …
This paper deals with the problem of string stability in a chain of acceleration-controlled vehicles, i.e. how input disturbances affect the distributed system for very long chains. There exist variants of string stability, like avoiding that a local disturbance gets amplified along the chain, or more strongly ensuring that the output vector's p-norm remains bounded for any bounded vector of input disturbances independently of the string length. They are all impossible to achieve with any linear controller if the vehicles only use relative information of few vehicles in front. Previous work ha…
In this paper, a variable gain super-twisting algorithm based on a barrier function is proposed for a class of first order disturbed systems with uncertain control coefficient and whose disturbances derivatives are bounded but they are unknown. The specific feature of this algorithm is that it can ensure the convergence of the output variable and maintain it in a predefined neighborhood of zero independent of the upper bound of the disturbances derivatives. Moreover, thanks to the structure of the barrier function, it forces the gain to decrease together with the output variable which yields t…
This paper deals with the problem of string stability of interconnected systems with double-integrator open loop dynamics (e.g.~acceleration-controlled vehicles). We analyze an asymmetric bidirectional linear controller, where each vehicle is coupled solely to its immediate predecessor and to its immediate follower with different gains in these two directions. We show that in this setting, unlike with unidirectional or symmetric bidirectional controllers, string stability can be recovered when disturbances act only on a small ($N$-independent) set of leading vehicles. This improves existing re…
