We develop an assume-guarantee framework for control of large scale linear (time-varying) systems from finite-time reach and avoid or infinite-time invariance specifications. The contracts describe the admissible set of states and controls for individual subsystems. A set of contracts compose correctly if mutual assumptions and guarantees match in a way that we formalize. We propose a rich parameterization of contracts such that the set of parameters that compose correctly is convex. Moreover, we design a potential function of parameters that describes the distance of contracts from a correct composition. Thus, the verification and synthesis for the aggregate system are broken to solving small convex programs for individual subsystems, where correctness is ultimately achieved in a compositional way. Illustrative examples demonstrate the scalability of our method.
Verifying specifications for large-scale modern engineering systems can be a time-consuming task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of modest size. Recently, contract-based design and verification has been proposed as a modular framework for specifications, and linear-programming-based techniques have been presented for verifying that a given system satisfies a given contract. In this paper, we extend this assume/guarantee framework by presenting necessary and sufficient conditions for a collection of contracts on individual components to refine a contract on the compo…
We take a divide and conquer approach to design controllers for reachability problems given large-scale linear systems with polyhedral constraints on states, controls, and disturbances. Such systems are made of small subsystems with coupled dynamics. We treat the couplings as additional disturbances and use assume-guarantee (AG) contracts to characterize these disturbance sets. For each subsystem, we design and implement a robust controller locally, subject to its own constraints and contracts. The main contribution of this paper is a method to derive the contracts via a novel parameterization…
React to Surprises: Stable-by-Design Neural Feedback Control and the Youla-REN
Australian Centre for Robotics（澳大利亚机器人中心）；School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering（航空航天、机械与机电工程学院）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems（信息与决策系统实验室）；Dept. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电气工程与计算机科学系）
Ensuring constraint satisfaction in large-scale systems with hard constraints is vital in many safety critical systems. The challenge is to design controllers that are efficiently synthesized offline, easily implementable online, and provide formal correctness guarantees. In this paper, we provide a method to compute correct-by-construction controllers for a network of coupled linear systems with additive bounded disturbances such that i) the design of the controllers is fully compositional - we use an optimization-based approach that iteratively computes subsystem-level assume-guarantee contr…
We present a compositional control synthesis method based on assume-guarantee contracts with application to correct-by-construction design of vehicular mission plans. In our approach, a mission-level specification expressed in a fragment of signal temporal logic (STL) is decomposed into predicates defined on non-overlapping time intervals. The STL predicates are then mapped to an aggregation of contracts associated with continuously differentiable time-varying control barrier functions. The barrier functions are used to constrain the lower-level control synthesis problem, which is solved via q…
A Nonlinear Separation Principle via Contraction Theory: Applications to Neural Networks, Control, and Learning
Center for Control, Dynamical Systems, and Computation, UC Santa Barbara（控制、动态系统与计算中心，加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino（电子与电信系，托里诺理工学院）；Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University（先进科学与工程研究生院，广岛大学）
Safety by Invariance, Liveness through Refinement: Heterogeneous Contract Framework for Co-Design of Layered Control
Laboratory of Signals and Systems (L2S), CNRS, CentraleSupelec, Paris-Saclay University, France（信号与系统实验室（L2S），CNRS，CentraleSupelec，巴黎-萨克雷大学，法国）；College of Computing, University Mohammed VI Polytechnic, Benguerir, Morocco（计算学院，穆罕默德六世理工学院，贝内乌尔，摩洛哥）
Australian Centre for Field Robotics（澳大利亚野外机器人中心）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
This paper presents a parameterization of nonlinear controllers for uncertain systems building on a recently developed neural network architecture, called the recurrent equilibrium network (REN), and a nonlinear version of the Youla parameterization. The proposed framework has "built-in" guarantees of stability, i.e., all policies in the search space result in a contracting (globally exponentially stable) closed-loop system. Thus, it requires very mild assumptions on the choice of cost function and the stability property can be generalized to unseen data. Another useful feature of this approac…
This paper presents ConVex optimization-based Stochastic steady-state Tracking Error Minimization (CV-STEM), a new state feedback control framework for a class of Ito stochastic nonlinear systems and Lagrangian systems. Its innovation lies in computing the control input by an optimal contraction metric, which greedily minimizes an upper bound of the steady-state mean squared tracking error of the system trajectories. Although the problem of minimizing the bound is non-convex, its equivalent convex formulation is proposed utilizing state-dependent coefficient parameterizations of the nonlinear …
Virtualization of computing and networking, IT-OT convergence, cybersecurity and AI-based enhancement of autonomy are significantly increasing the complexity of CPS and CPSoS. New challenges have emerged to demonstrate that these systems are safe and secure. We emphasize the role of control and emerging fields therein, like symbolic control or set-based fault-tolerant and decentralized control, to address safety. We have chosen three open verification problems we deem central in cost-effective development and certification of safety critical CPSoS. We review some promising threads of research …
