Paper ID: 2401.14907

Learning Local Control Barrier Functions for Safety Control of Hybrid Systems

Shuo Yang, Yu Chen, Xiang Yin, Rahul Mangharam

Hybrid dynamical systems are ubiquitous as practical robotic applications often involve both continuous states and discrete switchings. Safety is a primary concern for hybrid robotic systems. Existing safety-critical control approaches for hybrid systems are either computationally inefficient, detrimental to system performance, or limited to small-scale systems. To amend these drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a learningenabled approach to construct local Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to guarantee the safety of a wide class of nonlinear hybrid dynamical systems. The end result is a safe neural CBFbased switching controller. Our approach is computationally efficient, minimally invasive to any reference controller, and applicable to large-scale systems. We empirically evaluate our framework and demonstrate its efficacy and flexibility through two robotic examples including a high-dimensional autonomous racing case, against other CBF-based approaches and model predictive control.

Submitted: Jan 26, 2024