English

Synthesis and verification of robust-adaptive safe controllers

Systems and Control 2025-11-12 v2 Robotics Systems and Control

Abstract

Safe control with guarantees generally requires the system model to be known. It is far more challenging to handle systems with uncertain parameters. In this paper, we propose a generic algorithm that can synthesize and verify safe controllers for systems with constant, unknown parameters. In particular, we use robust-adaptive control barrier functions (raCBFs) to achieve safety. We develop new theories and techniques using sum-of-squares that enable us to pose synthesis and verification as a series of convex optimization problems. In our experiments, we show that our algorithms are general and scalable, applying them to three different polynomial systems of up to moderate size (7D). Our raCBFs are currently the most effective way to guarantee safety for uncertain systems, achieving 100% safety and up to 55% performance improvement over a robust baseline.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.00822,
  title  = {Synthesis and verification of robust-adaptive safe controllers},
  author = {Simin Liu and Kai S. Yun and John M. Dolan and Changliu Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.00822},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

First 2 authors contributed equally

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:09:03.071Z