Prediction-Based Control Barrier Functions for Input-Constrained Safety Critical Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces prediction-based control barrier functions (PB-CBFs) to ensure safety in input-constrained dynamical systems, demonstrated through aircraft stall prevention simulations.

Contribution

It presents a novel prediction-based approach to define and implement CBFs for complex systems with input constraints, extending existing CBF methods.

Findings

PB-CBF effectively maintains safety under input constraints.

The scheme outperforms basic CBF in complex nonlinear systems.

Successful application to aircraft stall prevention simulations.

Abstract

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have emerged as a popular topic in safety critical control due to their ability to provide formal safety guarantees for dynamical systems. Despite their powerful capabilities, the determination of feasible CBFs for input-constrained systems is still a formidable task and a challenging research issue. The present work aims to tackle this problem by focusing on an alternative approach towards a generalization of some ideas introduced in the existing CBF literature. The approach provides a rigorous yet straightforward method to define and implement prediction-based control barrier functions for complex dynamical systems to ensure safety with bounded inputs. This is accomplished by introducing a prediction-based term into the CBF that allows for the required margin needed to null the CBF rate of change given the specified input constraints. Having established the theoretical groundwork, certain remarks are subsequently presented with regards to the scheme's implementation. Finally, the proposed prediction-based control barrier function (PB-CBF) scheme is implemented for two numerical examples. In particular, the second example is related to aircraft stall prevention, which is meant to demonstrate the functionality and capability of the PB-CBFs in handling complex nonlinear dynamical systems via simulations. In both examples, the performance of the PB-CBF is compared with that of a non-prediction based basic CBF.