Volume 33, Issue 6 pp. 3661-3676
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Safety-critical control for robotic systems with uncertain model via control barrier function

Sihua Zhang

Sihua Zhang

School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, People's Republic of China

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Di-Hua Zhai

Corresponding Author

Di-Hua Zhai

School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, People's Republic of China

Yangtze Delta Region Academy of Beijing Institute of Technology, Jiaxing, People's Republic of China

Correspondence Di-Hua Zhai, School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, People's Republic of China.

Email: [email protected]

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Yuhan Xiong

Yuhan Xiong

School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, People's Republic of China

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Juncheng Lin

Juncheng Lin

School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, People's Republic of China

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Yuanqing Xia

Yuanqing Xia

School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, People's Republic of China

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First published: 04 January 2023
Citations: 2

Funding information: National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Numbers: 62173035, 61803033, 61836001

Abstract

Usually, it is difficult to build accurate dynamic models for real robots, which makes safety-critical control a challenge. In this regard, this article proposes a double-level framework to design safety-critical controller for robotic systems with uncertain dynamics. The high level planner plans a safe trajectory for low level tracker based on the control barrier function (CBF). First, the high level planning is done independently of the dynamic model by quadratic programs subject to CBF constraint. Afterward, a novel method is proposed to learn the uncertainty of drift term and input gain in nonlinear affine-control system by a data-driven Gaussian process (GP) approach, in which the learning result of uncertainty in input gain is associated with CBF. Then, a Gaussian processes-based control barrier function (GP-CBF) is designed to guarantee the tracking safety with a lower bound on the probability for the low level tracker. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed framework is verified by the numerical simulation of UR3 robot.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this article.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

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