This paper addresses the problem of safety-critical control for systems with unknown dynamics. It has been shown that stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states while optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and control constraints can be reduced to a sequence of quadratic programs (QPs) by using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs). Our recently proposed High Order CBFs (HOCBFs) can accommodate constraints of arbitrary relative degree. One of the main challenges in this approach is obtaining accurate system dynamics, which is especially difficult for systems that require online model identification given limited computational resources and system data. In order to approximate the real unmodelled system dynamics, we define adaptive affine control dynamics which are updated based on the error states obtained by real-time sensor measurements. We define a HOCBF for a safety requirement on the unmodelled system based on the adaptive dynamics and error states, and reformulate the safety-critical control problem as the above mentioned QP. Then, we determine the events required to solve the QP in order to guarantee safety. We also derive a condition that guarantees the satisfaction of the HOCBF constraint between events. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on an adaptive cruise control problem and compare it with the classical time-driven approach.
The efficient utilization of available resources while simultaneously achieving control objectives is a primary motivation in the event-triggered control paradigm. In many modern control applications, one such objective is enforcing the safety of a system. The goal of this paper is to carry out this vision by combining event-triggered and safety-critical control design. We discuss how a direct transcription, in the context of safety, of event-triggered methods for stabilization may result in designs that are not implementable on real hardware due to the lack of a minimum interevent time. We pr…
Guarding Force: Safety-Critical Compliant Control for Robot-Environment Interaction
Southeast University（东南大学）；School of Automation（自动化学院）；Loughborough University（拉夫堡大学）；College of Automation Engineering, Shanghai University of Electric Power（上海电力大学自动化工程学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
This paper proposes an event-triggered add-on safety mechanism to adjust the control parameters for timely braking in a networked vehicular system while maintaining maneuverability. Passenger vehicle maneuverability is significantly affected by the combined-slip friction effect, in which larger longitudinal tire slips result in considerable drop in lateral tire forces. This is of higher importance when unexpected dangerous situations occur on the road and immediate actions, such as braking, need to be taken to avoid collision. Harsh braking can lead to high-slip and loss of maneuverability, he…
Event-Triggered Practical Fixed-Time Integral Reinforcement Learning for Unknown Nonlinear Systems
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCM)（胡志明市技术大学机械工程学院，越南国立大学胡志明市）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学数学与统计系）
This paper proposes an event-triggered variational Bayesian filter for remote state estimation with unknown and time-varying noise covariances. After presetting multiple nominal process noise covariances and an initial measurement noise covariance, a variational Bayesian method and a fixed-point iteration method are utilized to jointly estimate the posterior state vector and the unknown noise covariances under a stochastic event-triggered mechanism. The proposed algorithm ensures low communication loads and excellent estimation performances for a wide range of unknown noise covariances. Finall…
In systems where the ability to actuate is a scarce resource, e.g., spacecrafts, it is desirable to only apply a given controller in an intermittent manner--with periods where the controller is on and periods where it is off. Motivated by the event-triggered control paradigm, where state-dependent triggers are utilized in a sample-and-hold context, we generalize this concept to include state triggers where the controller is off thereby creating a framework for intermittent control. Our approach utilizes certificates--either Lyapunov or barrier functions--to design intermittent trigger laws tha…
Decentralized Dynamic Event-triggered Output-feedback Control of Stochastic Non-triangular Interconnected Systems with Unknown Time-varying Sensor Sensitivity
This paper investigates the design of self-triggered controllers for networked control systems (NCSs), where the dynamics of the plant is \textit{unknown} apriori. To deal with the unknown transition dynamics, we employ the Gaussian process (GP) regression in order to learn the dynamics of the plant. To design the self-triggered controller, we formulate an optimal control problem, such that the optimal control and communication policies can be jointly designed based on the GP model of the plant. Moreover, we provide an overall implementation algorithm that jointly learns the dynamics of the pl…
Model-based algorithms are deeply rooted in modern control and systems theory. However, they usually come with a critical assumption - access to an accurate model of the system. In practice, models are far from perfect. Even precisely tuned estimates of unknown parameters will deteriorate over time. Therefore, it is essential to detect the change to avoid suboptimal or even dangerous behavior of a control system. We propose to combine statistical tests with dedicated parameter filters that track unknown system parameters from state data. These filters yield point estimates of the unknown param…
As the complexity of control systems increases, safety becomes an increasingly important property since safety violations can damage the plant and put the system operator in danger. When the system dynamics are unknown, safety-critical synthesis becomes more challenging. Additionally, modern systems are controlled digitally and hence behave as sampled-data systems, i.e., the system dynamics evolve continuously while the control input is applied at discrete time steps. In this paper, we study the problem of control synthesis for safety-critical sampled-data systems with unknown dynamics. We ove…
Geometry-Aware Safety-Critical Local Reactive Controller for Robot Navigation in Unknown and Cluttered Environments
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
We consider the problem of synthesis of safe controllers for nonlinear systems with unknown dynamics using Control Barrier Functions (CBF). We utilize Koopman operator theory (KOT) to associate the (unknown) nonlinear system with a higher dimensional bilinear system and propose a data-driven learning framework that uses a learner and a falsifier to simultaneously learn the Koopman operator based bilinear system and a corresponding CBF. We prove that the learned CBF for the latter bilinear system is also a valid CBF for the unknown nonlinear system by characterizing the $\ell^2$-norm error boun…
The deployment of autonomous systems that operate in unstructured environments necessitates algorithms to verify their safety. This can be challenging due to, e.g., black-box components in the control software, or undermodelled dynamics that prevent model-based verification. We present a novel verification framework for an unknown dynamical system from a given set of noisy observations of the dynamics. Using Gaussian processes trained on this data set, the framework abstracts the system as an uncertain Markov process with discrete states defined over the safe set. The transition bounds of the …
In this paper, a self-triggered scheme is proposed to optimally control the traffic flow of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) at conflict areas of a traffic network with the main aim of reducing the data exchange among CAVs in the control zone and at the same to minimize the travel time and energy consumption. The safety constraints and the vehicle limitations are considered using the Control Barrier Function (CBF) framework and a self-triggered scheme is proposed using the CBF constraints. Moreover, modified CBF constraints are developed to ensure a minimum inter-event interval for the …
We investigate a linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) tracking problem with safety and reachability constraints in the presence of an adversary who mounts an FDI attack on an unknown set of sensors. For each possible set of compromised sensors, we maintain a state estimator disregarding the sensors in that set, and calculate the optimal LQG control input at each time based on this estimate. We propose a control policy which constrains the control input to lie within a fixed distance of the optimal control input corresponding to each state estimate. The control input is obtained at each time step by…
Gaussian processes have become a promising tool for various safety-critical settings, since the posterior variance can be used to directly estimate the model error and quantify risk. However, state-of-the-art techniques for safety-critical settings hinge on the assumption that the kernel hyperparameters are known, which does not apply in general. To mitigate this, we introduce robust Gaussian process uniform error bounds in settings with unknown hyperparameters. Our approach computes a confidence region in the space of hyperparameters, which enables us to obtain a probabilistic upper bound for…
In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach to formally verify the safety of (potentially) unknown discrete-time continuous-space stochastic systems. The proposed framework is based on a notion of barrier certificates together with data collected from trajectories of unknown systems. We first reformulate the barrier-based safety verification as a robust convex problem (RCP). Solving the acquired RCP is hard in general because not only the state of the system lives in a continuous set, but also and more problematic, the unknown model appears in one of the constraints of RCP. Instead, we le…
Safety is always one of the most critical principles for a system to be controlled. This paper investigates a safety-critical control scheme for unknown structured systems by using the control barrier function (CBF) method. Benefited from the dynamic regressor extension and mixing (DREM), an extended element-wise parameter identification law is utilized to dismiss the uncertainty. On the one hand, it is shown that the proposed control scheme can always guarantee the safety in the identification process with noised signal injection excitation, which was not considered in the previous study. On …
This paper considers the control of uncertain systems that are operated under limited resource factors, such as battery life or hardware longevity. We consider here resource-aware self-triggered control techniques that schedule system operation non-uniformly in time in order to balance performance against resource consumption. When running in an uncertain environment, unknown disturbances may deteriorate system performance by acting adversarially against the planned event triggering schedule. In this work, we propose a resource-aware stochastic predictive control scheme to tackle this challeng…
