Model-Free Safety-Critical Control for Robotic Systems
Abstract
This paper presents a framework for the safety-critical control of robotic systems, when safety is defined on safe regions in the configuration space. To maintain safety, we synthesize a safe velocity based on control barrier function theory without relying on a -- potentially complicated -- high-fidelity dynamical model of the robot. Then, we track the safe velocity with a tracking controller. This culminates in model-free safety critical control. We prove theoretical safety guarantees for the proposed method. Finally, we demonstrate that this approach is application-agnostic. We execute an obstacle avoidance task with a Segway in high-fidelity simulation, as well as with a Drone and a Quadruped in hardware experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2109.09047,
title = {Model-Free Safety-Critical Control for Robotic Systems},
author = {Tamas G. Molnar and Ryan K. Cosner and Andrew W. Singletary and Wyatt Ubellacker and Aaron D. Ames},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.09047},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Accepted to the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and submitted to the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 8 pages, 5 figures