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 competing objectives. In this paper, we provide a unified theoretical treatment of Lyapunov and barrier functions in terms of converse theorems for stability properties with safety guarantees and reach-avoid-stay type specifications. We show that if a system (modeled as a dynamical system with measurable perturbations) possesses a stability with safety property, then there exists a smooth Lyapunov function to certify such a property. This Lyapunov function is shown to be defined on the entire set of initial conditions from which solutions satisfy this property. A similar but slightly weaker statement is made for reach-avoid-stay specifications. We show by a simple example that the latter statement cannot be strengthened without additional assumptions. We further extend the results for systems with control inputs and prove existence of converse Lyapunov-barrier functions for reach-and-avoid specifications. While the converse Lyapunov-barrier theorems are not constructive, as with classical converse Lyapunov theorems, we believe that the unified necessary and sufficient conditions with a single Lyapunov-barrier function are of theoretical interest and can hopefully shed some light on computational approaches.
For systems evolving on a Riemannian manifold, we propose converse Lyapunov theorems for asymptotic and exponential stability. The novelty of the proposed approach is that is does not rely on local Euclidean coordinate, and is thus valid on a wider domain than the immediate vicinity of the considered equilibrium. We also show how the constructions can be useful for robustness analysis.
In this paper, we report several new geometric and Lyapunov characterizations of incrementally stable systems on Finsler and Riemannian manifolds. A new and intrinsic proof of an important theorem in contraction analysis is given via the complete lift of the system. Based on this, two Lyapunov characterizations of incrementally stable systems are derived, namely, converse contraction theorems, and revelation of the connection between incremental stability and stability of an equilibrium point, in which the second result recovers and extends the classical Krasovskii's method.
Converse optimality theory addresses an optimal control problem conversely where the system is unknown and the value function is chosen. Previous work treated this problem both in continuous and discrete time and non-extensively considered disturbances. In this paper, the converse optimality theory is extended to the class of affine systems with disturbances in continuous time while considering norm constraints on both control inputs and disturbances. The admissibility theorem and the design of the internal dynamics model are generalized in this context. A robust stabilizability condition is a…
Reach-avoid analysis combines the construction of safety and specific progress guarantees, and is able to formalize many important engineering problems. In this paper we study the reach-avoid verification problem of systems modelled by ordinary differential equations using Lyapunov densities. Firstly, the weak reach-avoid verification is considered. Given an initial set, a safe set and a target set, the weak reach-avoid verification is to verify whether the reach-avoid property (i.e., the system will enter the target set eventually while staying inside the safe set before the first target hitt…
Learned models and policies can generalize effectively when evaluated within the distribution of the training data, but can produce unpredictable and erroneous outputs on out-of-distribution inputs. In order to avoid distribution shift when deploying learning-based control algorithms, we seek a mechanism to constrain the agent to states and actions that resemble those that it was trained on. In control theory, Lyapunov stability and control-invariant sets allow us to make guarantees about controllers that stabilize the system around specific states, while in machine learning, density models al…
The increasing uptake of inverter based resources (IBRs) has resulted in many new challenges for power system operators around the world. The high level of complexity of IBR generators makes accurate classical model-based stability analysis a difficult task. This paper proposes a novel methodology for solving the problem of estimating the Region of Attraction (ROA) of a nonlinear system by combining classical model based methods with modern data driven methods. Our method yields certifiable inner approximations of the ROA, typical to that of model based methods, but also harnesses trajectory d…
For general time-varying or switched (nonlinear) systems, converse Lyapunov theorems for stability are not available. In these cases, the integral input-to-state stability (iISS) property is not equivalent to the existence of an iISS-Lyapunov function but can still be characterized as the combination of global uniform asymptotic stability under zero input (0-GUAS) and uniformly bounded energy input-bounded state (UBEBS). For impulsive systems, asymptotic stability can be weak (when the asymptotic decay depends only on elapsed time) or strong (when such a decay depends also on the number of imp…
Context-Triggered Robust MPC for Temporal Logic Specifications
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）；Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)（奥地利科学技术研究院）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）
In this paper, we investigate the consensus problem of second-order multiagent systems under directed graphs. Simple yet robust consensus algorithms that advance existing achievements in accounting for velocity and input constraints, agent uncertainties, and lack of neighboring velocity measurements are proposed. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method can be applied to the consensus control of uncertain robotic manipulators with velocity and control torque constraints. We rigorously prove that the velocity and control inputs stay within prespecified ranges by tuning design parameters a …
We consider the problem of controller design for linear time-invariant cyber-physical systems (CPSs) controlled via networks. Specifically, we adopt the set-up that a controller has already been designed to stabilize the plant. However, the closed loop system may be subject to actuator and sensor attacks. We first perform a reachability analysis to see the effect of potential attacks. To further ensure the safety of the states of the system, we choose a subset of sensors that can be locally secured and made free of attacks. Using these limited resources, an extra controller is designed to enha…
Safe control designs for robotic systems remain challenging because of the difficulties of explicitly solving optimal control with nonlinear dynamics perturbed by stochastic noise. However, recent technological advances in computing devices enable online optimization or sampling-based methods to solve control problems. For example, Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), a Lyapunov-like control algorithm, have been proposed to numerically solve convex optimizations that determine control input to stay in the safe set. Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) uses forward sampling of stochastic differen…
Control problems are always challenging since they arise from the real-world systems where stochasticity and randomness are of ubiquitous presence. This naturally and urgently calls for developing efficient neural control policies for stabilizing not only the deterministic equations but the stochastic systems as well. Here, in order to meet this paramount call, we propose two types of controllers, viz., the exponential stabilizer (ES) based on the stochastic Lyapunov theory and the asymptotic stabilizer (AS) based on the stochastic asymptotic stability theory. The ES can render the controlled …
