English

Composing Control Barrier Functions for Complex Safety Specifications

Systems and Control 2023-12-05 v2 Robotics Systems and Control Dynamical Systems

Abstract

The increasing complexity of control systems necessitates control laws that guarantee safety w.r.t. complex combinations of constraints. In this letter, we propose a framework to describe compositional safety specifications with control barrier functions (CBFs). The specifications are formulated as Boolean compositions of state constraints, and we propose an algorithmic way to create a single continuously differentiable CBF that captures these constraints and enables safety-critical control. We describe the properties of the proposed CBF, and we demonstrate its efficacy by numerical simulations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.06647,
  title  = {Composing Control Barrier Functions for Complex Safety Specifications},
  author = {Tamas G. Molnar and Aaron D. Ames},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.06647},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted to the IEEE Control System Letters (L-CSS) and the 2024 American Control Conference (ACC). 6 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:19:52.107Z