Self-triggered Control for Safety Critical Systems using Control Barrier Functions
This work addresses the problem of efficient and safe real-time control for safety-critical systems, offering a method that guarantees safety without Zeno behavior.
The paper proposes a self-triggered control strategy using Control Barrier Functions to ensure safety in real-time systems, overcoming limitations of periodic controllers by reducing unnecessary updates and preventing safety constraint violations.
We propose a real-time control strategy that combines self-triggered control with Control Lyapunov Functions (CLF) and Control Barrier Functions (CBF). Similar to related works proposing CLF-CBF-based controllers, the computation of the controller is achieved by solving a Quadratic Program (QP). However, we propose a Zeroth-Order Hold (ZOH) implementation of the controller that overcomes the main limitations of traditional approaches based on periodic controllers, i.e., unnecessary controller updates and potential violations of the safety constraints. Central to our approach is the novel notion of safe period, which enforces a strong safety guarantee for implementing ZOH control. In addition, we prove that the system does not exhibit a Zeno behavior as it approaches the desired equilibrium.