Exactness Certificates for Closed-Form CBF Safety-Filter Projections

Abstract

For control-affine systems, standard and high-order control barrier function conditions are affine in the control input and are commonly enforced through quadratic-program-based safety filters. Although convex, these optimization problems may be undesirable in embedded, high-rate, or resource-limited implementations. This letter characterizes when the corresponding Euclidean projection can be recovered from the affine inequalities violated by a nominal control input. Given a nominal input, we form the violated set and compute the minimum-norm correction that enforces the violated inequalities with equality. This violated-set correction is closed form, but it need not equal the exact Euclidean projection onto the full feasible set. The main result gives a necessary and sufficient exactness certificate based on primal and dual feasibility, followed by structural sufficient conditions involving interactions among affine-inequality normals. An online certification algorithm is then presented to determine when the closed-form update is exact. When the certificate fails, a finite active-set search can be used to recover the exact projection. Numerical simulations illustrate that the violated-set correction can remain feasible while failing to be the exact projection due to dual infeasibility, and demonstrate computational speedup relative to a standard CBF-QP solver.