Soft-Minimum Barrier Functions for Safety-Critical Control Subject to Actuation Constraints

Abstract

This paper presents a new control approach for guaranteed safety (remaining in a safe set) subject to actuator constraints (the control is in a convex polytope). The control signals are computed using real-time optimization, including linear and quadratic programs subject to affine constraints, which are shown to be feasible. The control method relies on a new soft-minimum barrier function that is constructed using a finite-time-horizon prediction of the system trajectories under a known backup control. The main result shows that: (i) the control is continuous and satisfies the actuator constraints, and (ii) a subset of the safe set is forward invariant under the control. We also demonstrate this control on numerical simulations of an inverted pendulum and a double-integrator ground robot.

arXiv commentAmerican Control Conference (ACC) 2023, May 31 - June 2, 2023

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Composition of Control Barrier Functions With Differing Relative Degrees for Safety Under Input Constraints
• Soft-Minimum and Soft-Maximum Barrier Functions for Safety with Actuation Constraints
• Feasibility of multiple robust control barrier functions for bounding box constraints
• Text-Conditioned Background Generation for Editable Multi-Layer Documents