Safety in dynamical systems is commonly pursued using control barrier functions (CBFs) which enforce safety-constraints over the entire duration of a system's evolution. We propose a prescribed-time safety (PTSf) design which enforces safety only for a finite time of interest to the user. While traditional CBF designs would keep the system away from the barrier longer than necessary, our PTSf design lets the system reach the barrier by the prescribed time and obey the operator's intent thereafter. To emphasize the capability of our design for safety constraints with high relative degrees, we focus our exposition on a chain of integrators where the safety condition is defined for the state furthest from the control input. In contrast to existing CBF-based methods for high-relative degree constraints, our approach involves choosing explicitly specified gains (instead of class $\mathcal{K}$ functions), and, with the aid of backstepping, operates in the entirety of the original safe set with no additional restriction on the initial conditions. With Quadratic Programming (QP) being employed in the design, in addition to backstepping and CBFs with a PTSf property, we refer to our design as a QP-backstepping PT-CBF design. For illustration, we include a simulation for the double-integrator system.
This article targets at addressing the robust prescribed-time coordination control (PTCC) problems for single-integrator cooperative-antagonistic networks (CANs) with external disturbances under arbitrary fixed signed digraphs without any structural constraints. Toward this end, the PTCC problems for nominal single-integrator CANs without disturbances are first investigated and a fully distributed control protocol with a time-varying gain, which grows to infinity as the time approaches the settling time, is proposed utilizing the relative states of neighboring agents. Then, based on the propos…
In this paper, we address the global stabilization of chains of integrators by means of a bounded static feedback law whose p first time derivatives are bounded. Our construction is based on the technique of nested saturations introduced by Teel. We show that the control amplitude and the maximum value of its p first derivatives can be imposed below any prescribed values. Our results are illustrated by the stabilization of the third order integrator on the feedback and its first two derivatives.
This paper studies the control problem for safety-critical multi-agent systems based on quadratic programming (QP). Each controlled agent is modeled as a cascade connection of an integrator and an uncertain nonlinear actuation system. In particular, the integrator represents the position-velocity relation, and the actuation system describes the dynamic response of the actual velocity to the velocity reference signal. The notion of input-to-output stability (IOS) is employed to characterize the essential velocity-tracking capability of the actuation system. The uncertain actuation dynamics may …
This letter investigates the prescribed-instant stabilization problem for high-order integrator systems. In anothor word, the settling time under the presented controller is independent of the initial conditions and equals the prescribed time instant. The controller is designed with the concept of backstepping. A strict proof based on the Lyapunov method is presented to clamp the settling time to the prescribed time instant from both the left and right sides. This proof serves as an example to present a general framework to verify the designed stabilization property. It should be emphasized th…
We consider the problem of verifying safety for a pair of identical integrator agents in continuous time with compact set-valued input uncertainties. We encode this verification problem as that of certifying or falsifying the intersection of their reach sets. We transcribe the same into a variational problem, namely that of minimizing the support function of the difference of the two reach sets over the unit sphere. We illustrate the computational tractability of the proposed formulation by developing two cases in detail, viz. when the inputs have time-varying norm-bounded and generic hyperrec…
In this paper, a model reference adaptive control architecture is proposed for uncertain nonlinear systems to achieve prescribed performance guarantees. Specifically, a general nonlinear reference model system is considered that captures an ideal and safe system behavior. An adaptive control architecture is then proposed to suppress the effects of system uncertainties without any prior knowledge of their magnitude and rate upper bounds. More importantly, the proposed control architecture enforces the system state trajectories to evolve within a user-specified prescribed distance from the refer…
We consider the problem of guaranteeing that the transient voltages and currents stay within prescribed bounds in Direct Current (DC) microgrids, when the controller does not have access to accurate system dynamics due to the load being unknown and/or time-varying. To achieve this, we propose an optimization based controller design using control barrier functions. We show that the proposed controller has a decentralized structure and is robust with respect to the uncertainty in the precise values of the system parameters, such as the load.
Complex control systems are often described in a layered fashion, represented as higher-order systems where the inputs appear after a chain of integrators. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be powerful tools for safety-critical controller design of nonlinear systems, their application to higher-order systems adds complexity to the controller synthesis process -- it necessitates dynamically extending the CBF to include higher order terms, which consequently modifies the safe set in complex ways. We propose an alternative approach for addressing safety of higher-order systems…
Non-overshooting stabilization is a form of safe control where the setpoint chosen by the user is at the boundary of the safe set. Exponential non-overshooting stabilization, including suitable extensions to systems with deterministic and stochastic disturbances, has been solved by the second author and his coauthors. In this paper we develop homogeneous feedback laws for fixed-time nonovershooting stabilization for nonlinear systems that are input-output linearizable with a full relative degree, i.e., for systems that are diffeomorphically equivalent to the chain of integrators. These homogen…
Robots deployed in unstructured, real-world environments operate under considerable uncertainty due to imperfect state estimates, model error, and disturbances. Given this real-world context, the goal of this paper is to develop controllers that are provably safe under uncertainties. To this end, we leverage Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) which guarantee that a robot remains in a ``safe set'' during its operation -- yet CBFs (and their associated guarantees) are traditionally studied in the context of continuous-time, deterministic systems with bounded uncertainties. In this work, we study t…
This paper works towards unifying two popular approaches in the safety control community: Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). HJ Reachability has methods for direct construction of value functions that provide safety guarantees and safe controllers, however the online implementation can be overly conservative and/or rely on chattering bang-bang control. The CBF community has methods for safe-guarding controllers in the form of point-wise optimization using quadratic programs (CBF-QP), where the CBF-based safety certificate is used as a constraint. However, f…
The optimal performance of robotic systems is usually achieved near the limit of state and input bounds. Model predictive control (MPC) is a prevalent strategy to handle these operational constraints, however, safety still remains an open challenge for MPC as it needs to guarantee that the system stays within an invariant set. In order to obtain safe optimal performance in the context of set invariance, we present a safety-critical model predictive control strategy utilizing discrete-time control barrier functions (CBFs), which guarantees system safety and accomplishes optimal performance via …
Policy Library CBF: Finite-Horizon Safety at Runtime via Parallel Rollouts
Department of Robotics（机器人学系）；Department of Aerospace Engineering（航空航天工程系）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Toyota Motor North America, Research & Development（丰田美国北美洲研发部门）
CNRS, Institut de Recherche Mathématique de Rennes, University of Rennes（法国国家科学研究中心、雷恩数学研究所、雷恩大学）；Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University（马斯特里赫特大学高级计算科学系）；Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu（奥卢大学信息技术与电气工程学院）
Control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool to enforce safety of a control system. CBFs are commonly utilized in a quadratic program formulation (CBF-QP) as safety-critical constraints. A class $\mathcal{K}$ function in CBFs usually needs to be tuned manually in order to balance the trade-off between performance and safety for each environment. However, this process is often heuristic and can become intractable for high relative-degree systems. Moreover, it prevents the CBF-QP from generalizing to different environments in the real world. By embedding the optimization procedure…
InPTC: Integrated Planning and Tube-Following Control for Prescribed-Time Collision-Free Navigation of Wheeled Mobile Robots
School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学自动化科学与电气工程学院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)（香港理工大学）；Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM)（墨西哥自治技术学院）
In this work, we combine {Model Predictive Control} (MPC) and Control Barrier Function (CBF) design {methods} to create a hierarchical control law for simultaneous lane-keeping (LK) and obstacle avoidance (OA): at the low level, MPC performs LK via trajectory tracking during nominal operation; and at the high level, different CBF-based safety filters that ensure both LK and OA are designed and compared across some practical scenarios. In particular, we show that Exponential Safety (ESf) and Prescribed-Time Safety (PTSf) filters, which override the MPC control when necessary, result in feasible…
