Safety Critical Control for Nonlinear Systems with Complex Input Constraints

TL;DR

This paper introduces a control method using Control Barrier Functions for nonlinear systems with complex, time-varying input constraints, improving safety and constraint handling through system augmentation.

Contribution

It presents a novel augmentation-based control framework that simplifies handling complex input constraints within the CBF approach for nonlinear systems.

Findings

Successfully manages complex, time-varying input constraints

Simplifies quadratic programming formulation

Validated with numerical examples

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel Control Barrier Function (CBF) based controller for nonlinear systems with complex, time-varying input constraints. To deal with these constraints, we introduce an auxiliary control input to transform the original system into an augmented one, thus reformulating the constrained-input problem into a constrained-output one. This transformation simplifies the Quadratic Programming (QP) formulation and enhances compatibility with the CBF framework. As a result, the proposed method can systematically address the complex, time-varying, and state-dependent input constraints. The efficacy of the proposed approach is validated using numerical examples.