Robust Time-Varying Control Barrier Functions with Sector-Bounded Nonlinearities
This work addresses safety in control systems with nonlinearities and time-varying constraints, which is incremental as it builds on existing barrier function methods.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring safe operation for systems with input nonlinearities and time-varying safety constraints by extending the time-varying barrier function framework, resulting in a robust safety filter that minimally modifies baseline controller commands, as demonstrated on a spacecraft docking maneuver.
This paper presents a novel approach for ensuring safe operation of systems subject to input nonlinearities and time-varying safety constraints. We extend the time-varying barrier function framework to address time-varying safety constraints and explicitly account for control-dependent nonlinearities at the plant input. Guaranteed bounds on the input-output behavior of these nonlinearities are provided through pointwise-in-time quadratic constraints. The result is a class of robust time-varying control barrier functions that define a safety filter. This filter ensures robust safety for all admissible nonlinearities while minimally modifying the command generated by a baseline controller. We derive a second-order cone program (SOCP) to compute this safety filter online and provide feasibility conditions for ball-constrained inputs. The proposed approach is demonstrated on a spacecraft docking maneuver.