Jorge Cortés

Professor

Cymer Corporation Endowed Chair





Nonsmooth barrier functions with applications to multi-robot systems
P. Glotfelter, J. Cortés, M. Egerstedt
IEEE Control Systems Letters 1 (2) (2017), 310-315


Abstract

As multi-agent systems become more wide-spread and versatile, the ability to satisfy multiple system-level con- straints grows increasingly important. In applications ranging from automated cruise control to safety in robot swarms, barrier functions have emerged as a tool to provably meet such constraints by guaranteeing forward invariance of de- sirable sets. However, satisfying multiple constraints typically implies formulating multiple barrier functions, which would be ameliorated if the barrier functions could be composed together as Boolean logic formulae. The use of max and min operators, which yields nonsmooth functions, represents one path to accomplish Boolean compositions of barrier functions, and this work extends previously established concepts for barrier functions to a class of nonsmooth barrier functions that operate on systems described by differential inclusions. We validate our results by deploying Boolean compositions of nonsmooth barrier functions onto a team of mobile robots.

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Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego
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