Safety-Critical Controller Synthesis with Reduced-Order Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework that integrates reduced-order models with control barrier functions to design safety-critical controllers, ensuring safety guarantees for complex systems like drones and hopping robots.

Contribution

It formalizes the connection between full and reduced-order models and provides a method to transfer safety guarantees using simulation functions.

Findings

Framework successfully applied to drone control

Hardware demonstrations on 3D hopping robot

Safety guarantees transferred from ROM to full system

Abstract

Reduced-order models (ROMs) provide lower dimensional representations of complex systems, capturing their salient features while simplifying control design. Building on previous work, this paper presents an overarching framework for the integration of ROMs and control barrier functions, enabling the use of simplified models to construct safety-critical controllers while providing safety guarantees for complex full-order models. To achieve this, we formalize the connection between full and ROMs by defining projection mappings that relate the states and inputs of these models and leverage simulation functions to establish conditions under which safety guarantees may be transferred from a ROM to its corresponding full-order model. The efficacy of our framework is illustrated through simulation results on a drone and hardware demonstrations on ARCHER, a 3D hopping robot.