Jorge Cortés

Professor

Cymer Corporation Endowed Chair





Safety-critical control of discontinuous systems with nonsmooth safe sets
M. Alyaseen, N. Atanasov, J. Cortés
Automatica, submitted


Abstract

This paper studies the design of controllers for discontinuous dynamics that ensure the safety of non-smooth sets. The safe set is represented by arbitrarily nested unions and intersections of 0-superlevel sets of differentiable functions. We show that any optimization-based controller that satisfies only the point-wise active safety constraints is generally un-safe, ruling out the standard techniques developed for safety of continuous dynamics. This motivates the introduction of the notion of transition functions, which we employ to formulate a novel version of the safety constraints. These functions allow system trajectories to leave a component of the nonsmooth safe set to transition to a different one. The resulting controller is then defined as the solution to a convex optimization problem, which we show is feasible, and continuous wherever the system dynamics is continuous. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design approach in a multi-agent reconfiguration control problem.

pdf

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, California, 92093-0411

Ph: 1-858-822-7930
Fax: 1-858-822-3107

cortes at ucsd.edu
Skype id: jorgilliyo