Persistently Feasible Robust Safe Control by Safety Index Synthesis and Convex Semi-Infinite Programming (2209.06896v4)

Abstract: Model mismatches prevail in real-world applications. Ensuring safety for systems with uncertain dynamic models is critical. However, existing robust safe controllers may not be realizable when control limits exist. And existing methods use loose over-approximation of uncertainties, leading to conservative safe controls. To address these challenges, we propose a control-limits aware robust safe control framework for bounded state-dependent uncertainties. We propose safety index synthesis to find a robust safe controller guaranteed to be realizable under control limits. And we solve for robust safe control via Convex Semi-Infinite Programming, which is the tightest formulation for convex bounded uncertainties and leads to the least conservative control. In addition, we analyze when and how safety can be preserved under unmodeled uncertainties. Experiment results show that our robust safe controller is always realizable under control limits and is much less conservative than strong baselines.