Composing Control Barrier Functions for Complex Safety Specifications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for combining multiple control barrier functions to handle complex safety specifications in control systems, enabling safety guarantees for intricate constraint combinations.

Contribution

It presents a novel algorithm to construct a single differentiable CBF from Boolean compositions of constraints, facilitating safety-critical control for complex specifications.

Findings

The proposed CBF accurately captures complex safety constraints.

Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.

The framework ensures safety in systems with intricate constraint combinations.

Abstract

The increasing complexity of control systems necessitates control laws that guarantee safety w.r.t. complex combinations of constraints. In this letter, we propose a framework to describe compositional safety specifications with control barrier functions (CBFs). The specifications are formulated as Boolean compositions of state constraints, and we propose an algorithmic way to create a single continuously differentiable CBF that captures these constraints and enables safety-critical control. We describe the properties of the proposed CBF, and we demonstrate its efficacy by numerical simulations.