Synthesis and Verification of Robust-Adaptive Safe Controllers

June 2024

Synthesis and Verification of Robust-Adaptive Safe Controllers

Authors:

Simin Liu, Kai S. Yun, John M. Dolan, and Changliu Liu

Abstract:

Safe control with guarantees generally requires the system model to be known. It is far more challenging to handle systems with uncertain parameters. In this paper, we propose a generic algorithm that can synthesize and verify safe controllers for systems with constant, unknown parameters. In particular, we use robust-adaptive control barrier functions (raCBFs) to achieve safety. We develop new theories and techniques using sum-of-squares that enable us to pose synthesis and verification as a series of convex optimization problems. In our experiments, we show that our algorithms are general and scalable, applying them to three different polynomial systems of up to moderate size (7D). Our raCBFs are currently the most effective way to guarantee safety for uncertain systems, achieving 100% safety and up to 55% performance improvement over a robust baseline.
@conference{Liu-2024-143687,
author = {Simin Liu And Kai S. Yun And John M. Dolan And Changliu Liu},
title = {Synthesis and Verification of Robust-Adaptive Safe Controllers},
year = {2024},
month = {June},
pages = {2265-2272},
keywords = {safe control, uncertain parameters, robust-adaptive control, control barrier functions},
}
Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.