Control Barrier Functions for Linear Continuous-Time Input-Delay Systems with Limited-Horizon Previewable Disturbances

Abstract

Cyber-physical and autonomous systems are often equipped with mechanisms that provide predictions/projections of future disturbances, e.g., road curvatures, commonly referred to as preview or lookahead, but this preview information is typically not leveraged in the context of deriving control barrier functions (CBFs) for safety. This paper proposes a novel limited preview control barrier function (LPrev-CBF) that avoids both ends of the spectrum, where on one end, the standard CBF approach treats the (previewable) disturbances simply as worst-case adversarial signals and on the other end, a recent Prev-CBF approach assumes that the disturbances are previewable and known for the entire future. Moreover, our approach applies to input-delay systems and has recursive feasibility guarantees since we explicitly take input constraints/bounds into consideration. Thus, our approach provides strong safety guarantees in a less conservative manner than standard CBF approaches while considering a more realistic setting with limited preview and input delays.