Robust Safety Filters for Lipschitz-Bounded Adaptive Closed-Loop Systems with Structured Uncertainties
This work addresses safety for adaptive control systems with structured uncertainties, representing an incremental improvement over existing conservative methods.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring safety during transient adaptation in uncertain dynamical systems by proposing a reference-based adaptive safety framework that reduces conservatism while maintaining formal guarantees. The result is a robust control barrier function condition reformulated as a convex second-order cone program, which explicitly accounts for transient plant-reference mismatch.
Adaptive control provides closed-loop stability and reference tracking for uncertain dynamical systems through online parameter adaptation. These properties alone, however, do not ensure safety in the sense of forward invariance of state constraints, particularly during transient phases of adaptation. Control barrier function (CBF)-based safety filters have been proposed to address this limitation, but existing approaches often rely on conservative constraint tightening or static safety margins within quadratic program formulations. This paper proposes a reference-based adaptive safety framework for systems with structured parametric uncertainty that explicitly accounts for transient plant-reference mismatch. Safety is enforced at the reference level using a barrier-function-based filter, while adaptive control drives the plant to track the safety-certified reference. By exploiting Lipschitz bounds on the closed-loop error dynamics, a robust CBF condition is derived and reformulated as a convex second-order cone program (SOCP). The resulting approach reduces conservatism while preserving formal guarantees of forward invariance, stability, and tracking.