Safety-Critical Control with Input Delay in Dynamic Environment
This addresses safety for real-life control systems like autonomous vehicles and robots in changing environments, but it is incremental as it builds on existing barrier function methods.
The paper tackled safety-critical control for nonlinear systems in dynamic environments with input delay by introducing environmental control barrier functions (ECBFs), achieving robust safety guarantees through prediction of future states and demonstrated efficacy in adaptive cruise control and robotics applications.
Endowing nonlinear systems with safe behavior is increasingly important in modern control. This task is particularly challenging for real-life control systems that must operate safely in dynamically changing environments. This paper develops a framework for safety-critical control in dynamic environments, by establishing the notion of environmental control barrier functions (ECBFs). The framework is able to guarantee safety even in the presence of input delay, by accounting for the evolution of the environment during the delayed response of the system. The underlying control synthesis relies on predicting the future state of the system and the environment over the delay interval, with robust safety guarantees against prediction errors. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated by a simple adaptive cruise control problem and a more complex robotics application on a Segway platform.