Composing Control Barrier Functions for Complex Safety Specifications

Tamas G. Molnar; Aaron D. Ames

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arXiv · 2309.06647

Composing Control Barrier Functions for Complex Safety Specifications

Tamas G. Molnar·Aaron D. Ames

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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.

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Tamas G. Molnar, Aaron D. Ames. 2023-09-13. Composing Control Barrier Functions for Complex Safety Specifications. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06647

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