Safety-Critical Controller Synthesis with Reduced-Order Models

Posted on September 30, 2024

Overview

Safety-critical control using reduced order models.

Abstract

Reduced-order models (ROMs) provide lower di- mensional representations of complex systems, capturing their salient features while simplifying control design. Building on previous work, this paper presents an overarching framework for the integration of ROMs and control barrier functions, enabling the use of simplified models to construct safety-critical controllers while providing safety guarantees for complex full- order models. To achieve this, we formalize the connection between full and ROMs by defining projection mappings that relate the states and inputs of these models and leverage simulation functions to establish conditions under which safety guarantees may be transferred from a ROM to its corre- sponding full-order model. The efficacy of our framework is illustrated through simulation results on a drone and hardware demonstrations on ARCHER, a 3D hopping robot.

Paper