This paper studies control synthesis for a general class of nonlinear, control-affine dynamical systems under additive disturbances and state-estimation errors. We enforce forward invariance of static and dynamic safe sets and convergence to a given goal set within a user-defined time in the presence of input constraints. We use robust variants of control barrier functions (CBF) and fixed-time control Lyapunov functions (FxT-CLF) to incorporate a class of additive disturbances in the system dynamics, and state-estimation errors. To solve the underlying constrained control problem, we formulate a quadratic program and use the proposed robust CBF-FxT-CLF conditions to compute the control input. We showcase the efficacy of the proposed method on a numerical case study involving multiple underactuated marine vehicles.
We introduce High-Relative Degree Stochastic Control Lyapunov functions and Barrier Functions as a means to ensure asymptotic stability of the system and incorporate state dependent high relative degree safety constraints on a non-linear stochastic systems. Our proposed formulation also provides a generalisation to the existing literature on control Lyapunov and barrier functions for stochastic systems. The control policies are evaluated using a constrained quadratic program that is based on control Lyapunov and barrier functions. Our proposed control design is validated via simulated experime…
Stability and safety are two important aspects in safety-critical control of dynamical systems. It has been a well established fact in control theory that stability properties can be characterized by Lyapunov functions. Reachability properties can also be naturally captured by Lyapunov functions for finite-time stability. Motivated by safety-critical control applications, such as in autonomous systems and robotics, there has been a recent surge of interests in characterizing safety properties using barrier functions. Lyapunov and barrier functions conditions, however, are sometimes viewed as c…
This paper presents adaptive robust quadratic program (QP) based control using control Lyapunov and barrier functions for nonlinear systems subject to time-varying and state-dependent uncertainties. An adaptive estimation law is proposed to estimate the pointwise value of the uncertainties with pre-computable estimation error bounds. The estimated uncertainty and the error bounds are then used to formulate a robust QP, which ensures that the actual uncertain system will not violate the safety constraints defined by the control barrier function. Additionally, the accuracy of the uncertainty est…
This paper studies the problem of utilizing data-driven adaptive control techniques to guarantee stability and safety of uncertain nonlinear systems with high relative degree. We first introduce the notion of a High Order Robust Adaptive Control Barrier Function (HO-RaCBF) as a means to compute control policies guaranteeing satisfaction of high relative degree safety constraints in the face of parametric model uncertainty. The developed approach guarantees safety by initially accounting for all possible parameter realizations but adaptively reduces uncertainty in the parameter estimates levera…
We present a novel way of generating Lyapunov functions for proving linear convergence rates of first-order optimization methods. Our approach provably obtains the fastest linear convergence rate that can be verified by a quadratic Lyapunov function (with given states), and only relies on solving a small-sized semidefinite program. Our approach combines the advantages of performance estimation problems (PEP, due to Drori & Teboulle (2014)) and integral quadratic constraints (IQC, due to Lessard et al. (2016)), and relies on convex interpolation (due to Taylor et al. (2017c;b)).
For a broad class of nonlinear systems, we formulate the problem of guaranteeing safety with optimality under constraints. Specifically, we define controlled safety for differential inclusions with constraints on the states and the inputs. Through the use of nonsmooth analysis tools, we show that a continuous optimal control law can be selected from a set-valued constraint capturing the system constraints and conditions guaranteeing safety using control barrier functions. Our results guarantee optimality and safety via a continuous state-feedback law designed using nonsmooth control barrier fu…
A Pontryagin-based approach to solve a class of constrained Nonlinear Model Predictive Control problems is proposed which employs the method of barrier functions for dealing with the state constraints. Unlike the existing works in literature the proposed method is able to cope with nonlinear input and state constraints without any significant modification of the optimization algorithm. A stability analysis of the closed-loop system is carried out by using the L-2 norm of the predicted state tracking error as a Lyapunov function. Theoretical results are tested and confirmed by numerical simulat…
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…
This paper aims at the safety-critical control synthesis of network systems such that the satisfaction of the safety constraints can be guaranteed. To handle the large state dimension of such systems, an assume-guarantee contract is used to break the large synthesis problem into smaller subproblems. Parameterized signal temporal logic (pSTL) is used to formally describe the behaviors of the subsystems, which we use as the template for the contract. We show that robust control invariant sets (RCIs) for the subsystems can be composed to form a robust control invariant set for the whole network s…
This work deals with the event-triggered finite-time control for high-order systems based on an implicit Lyapunov function (ILF). With the construction of an inverse optimal problem, a novel expression of ILF is obtained. By designing the event-triggering mechanism elaborately, it is guaranteed that the trivial solution of the closed-loop system is globally finite-time stable and there exists no Zeno phenomenon. Extensions to the scenario with a multi-agent system are studied where a finite-time tracking control drives all the agents to reach a consensus. The obtained theoretical results are s…
In this paper, we present Lyapunov-based {\color{black}time varying} controllers for {\color{black}fast} stabilization of a perturbed chain of integrators with bounded uncertainties. We refer to such controllers as {\color{black}time varying} higher order sliding mode controllers since they are designed for nonlinear Single-Input-Single-Output (SISO) systems with bounded uncertainties such that the uncertainty bounds are unknown. %{\color{blue} OLD: Our main result states that, given any neighborhood $\varepsilon$ of the origin, we determine a controller insuring, for every uncertainty bounds,…
This paper tackles state feedback control of switched linear systems under arbitrary switching. We propose a data-driven control framework that allows to compute a stabilizing state feedback using only a finite set of observations of trajectories with quadratic and sum of squares (SOS) Lyapunov functions. We do not require any knowledge on the dynamics or the switching signal, and as a consequence, we aim at solving \emph{uniform} stabilization problems in which the feedback is stabilizing for all possible switching sequences. In order to generalize the solution obtained from trajectories to t…
We present a new data-driven method to provide probabilistic stability guarantees for black-box switched linear systems. By sampling a finite number of observations of trajectories, we construct approximate Lyapunov functions and deduce the stability of the underlying system with a user-defined confidence. The number of observations required to attain this confidence level on the guarantee is explicitly characterized. Our contribution is twofold: first, we propose a novel approach for common quadratic Lyapunov functions, relying on sensitivity analysis of a quasi-convex optimization program. B…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to develop feedback controllers that endow systems with properties such as safety and stability. The guarantees ensured by these controllers often rely on accurate estimates of the system state for determining control actions. In practice, measurement model uncertainty can lead to error in state estimates that degrades these guarantees. In this paper, we seek to unify techniques from control theory and machine learning to synthesize controllers that achieve safety in the presence of measurement model uncertainty. We define the notion of a Measurement-Robus…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Ningbo University（宁波大学）；Ningbo Artificial Intelligence Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学宁波人工智能研究院）；Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）
In this paper, we propose a novel nonlinear observer based on neural networks, called neural observer, for observation tasks of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems and uncertain nonlinear systems. In particular, the neural observer designed for uncertain systems is inspired by the active disturbance rejection control, which can measure the uncertainty in real-time. The stability analysis (e.g., exponential convergence rate) of LTI and uncertain nonlinear systems (involving neural observers) are presented and guaranteed, where it is shown that the observation problems can be solved only using t…
We describe an algorithm based on a logarithmic barrier function, Newton's method, and linear conjugate gradients that obtains an approximate minimizer of a smooth function over the nonnegative orthant. We develop a bound on the complexity of the approach, stated in terms of the required accuracy and the cost of a single gradient evaluation of the objective function and/or a matrix-vector multiplication involving the Hessian of the objective. The approach can be implemented without explicit calculation or storage of the Hessian.
We study the stability properties of a class of time-varying nonlinear systems. We assume that non-strict input-to-state stable (ISS) Lyapunov functions for our systems are given and posit a mild persistency of excitation condition on our given Lyapunov functions which guarantee the existence of strict ISS Lyapunov functions for our systems. Next, we provide simple direct constructions of explicit strict ISS Lyapunov functions for our systems by applying an integral smoothing method. We illustrate our constructions using a tracking problem for a rotating rigid body.
For a general time-varying system, we prove that existence of an "Output Robust Control Lyapunov Function" implies existence of continuous time-varying feedback stabilizer, which guarantees output asymptotic stability with respect to the resulting closed-loop system. The main results of the present work constitute generalizations of a well-known result towards feedback stabilization due to J. M. Coron and L. Rosier concerning stabilization of autonomous systems by means of time-varying periodic feedback.
Georgia State University（佐治亚州立大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
We develop a versatile deep neural network architecture, called Lyapunov-Net, to approximate Lyapunov functions of dynamical systems in high dimensions. Lyapunov-Net guarantees positive definiteness, and thus it can be easily trained to satisfy the negative orbital derivative condition, which only renders a single term in the empirical risk function in practice. This significantly reduces the number of hyper-parameters compared to existing methods. We also provide theoretical justifications on the approximation power of Lyapunov-Net and its complexity bounds. We demonstrate the efficiency of t…
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to synthesize linear feedback controllers for navigating in polygonal environments using noisy measurements and a convex cell decomposition. Our method is based on formulating chance constraints for the convergence and collision avoidance condition. In particular, the stability and safety guarantees come from chance Control Barrier Function (CBF) constraints and chance Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) constraints, respectively. We use convex over-approximations to get upper bounds of the constraints, leading to a convex robust quadratic program for fin…
The notion of the relaxed Robust Control Lyapunov Function (relaxed RCLF) is introduced and is exploited for the design of robust feedback stabilizers for nonlinear systems. Particularly, it is shown for systems with input constraints that relaxed RCLFs can be easily obtained, while RCLFs are not available. Moreover, it is shown that the use of relaxed RCLFs usually results to different feedback designs from the ones obtained by the use of the standard RCLF methodology. Using the relaxed RCLFs feedback design methodology, a simple controller that guarantees robust global stabilization of a per…
Piecewise-Linear in Rates (PWLR) Lyapunov functions are introduced for a class of Chemical Reaction Networks (CRNs). In addition to their simple structure, these functions are robust with respect to arbitrary monotone reaction rates, of which mass-action is a special case. The existence of such functions ensures the convergence of trajectories towards equilibria, and guarantee their asymptotic stability with respect to the corresponding stoichiometric compatibility class. We give the definition of these Lyapunov functions, prove their basic properties, and provide algorithms for constructing t…
