Control Density Function for Robust Safety and Convergence

TL;DR

This paper introduces a control density function (CDF) approach for safe and robust control of nonlinear systems, offering a dual perspective to control barrier functions with a physical occupancy interpretation, and demonstrates its effectiveness through simulations.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel CDF-based safe control synthesis method that combines safety and convergence in a single quadratic program, with robustness guarantees against uncertainties.

Findings

CDF-based QP effectively ensures safety and convergence.

The approach demonstrates robustness in navigation tasks.

Simulation results validate the method's practical applicability.

Abstract

We introduce a novel approach for safe control design based on the density function. A control density function (CDF) is introduced to synthesize a safe controller for a nonlinear dynamic system. The CDF can be viewed as a dual to the control barrier function (CBF), a popular approach used for safe control design. While the safety certificate using the barrier function is based on the notion of invariance, the dual certificate involving the density function has a physical interpretation of occupancy. This occupancy-based physical interpretation is instrumental in providing an analytical construction of density function used for safe control synthesis. The safe control design problem is formulated using the density function as a quadratic programming (QP) problem. In contrast to the QP proposed for control synthesis using CBF, the proposed CDF-based QP can combine both the safety and convergence conditions to target state into single constraints. Further, we consider robustness against uncertainty in system dynamics and the initial condition and provide theoretical results for robust navigation using the CDF. Finally, we present simulation results for safe navigation with single integrator and double-gyre fluid flow-field examples, followed by robust navigation using the bicycle model and autonomous lane-keeping examples.