Enhancing Feasibility and Safety of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control with Discrete-Time Control Barrier Functions
This work addresses safety-critical control in robotics, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods by resolving a key theoretical limitation in feasibility and safety tradeoffs.
The paper tackles the tradeoff between feasibility and safety in nonlinear model predictive control for robotics by proposing two formulations that unify control Lyapunov functions and control barrier functions, using slack variables to enhance both aspects simultaneously, with theoretical analysis and numerical validation showing improved performance.
Safety is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. Recently, one-step or multi-step optimal control problems for discrete-time nonlinear dynamical system were formulated to offer tracking stability using control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) while subject to input constraints as well as safety-critical constraints using control barrier functions (CBFs). The limitations of these existing approaches are mainly about feasibility and safety. In the existing approaches, the feasibility of the optimization and the system safety cannot be enhanced at the same time theoretically. In this paper, we propose two formulations that unifies CLFs and CBFs under the framework of nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC). In the proposed formulations, safety criteria is commonly formulated as CBF constraints and stability performance is ensured with either a terminal cost function or CLF constraints. Slack variables with relaxing technique are introduced on the CBF constraints to resolve the tradeoff between feasibility and safety so that they can be enhanced at the same. The advantages about feasibility and safety of proposed formulations compared with existing methods are analyzed theoretically and validated with numerical results.