Constructive Safety Control

Abstract: This paper proposes a constructive approach to safety control of nonlinear cascade systems subject to multiple state constraints. New design ingredients include a unified characterization of safety and stability for systematic designs of safety controllers, and a novel technique of reshaping the feasible sets of quadratically constrained quadratic programming induced from safety control. The proposed method guarantees Lipschitz continuity of virtual control laws, enabling a stepwise constructive design. A refined nonlinear small-gain synthesis is employed to address the nonlinear uncertain interconnections between the resulting subsystems corresponding to different virtual control laws, and to guarantee the achievement of the safety control objective. When the safety constraints are removed, the proposed approach coincides with the standard constructive nonlinear control. The proposed safety-control algorithm is experimentally validated in a testbed involving a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicle taking off in narrow spaces.