Converse Theorems for Certificates of Safety and Stability

Abstract: Motivated by the key role of control barrier functions (CBFs) in assessing safety and enabling the synthesis of safe controllers in nonlinear control systems, this paper presents a suite of converse results on CBFs. Given any safe set, we first identify a set of general sufficient conditions which guarantee the existence of a CBF. Our technical analysis also enables us to define an extended notion of CBF which is always guaranteed to exist if the set is safe. We next turn our attention to the problem of joint safety and stability, and give conditions under which the notions of control Lyapunov-barrier function (CLBF) and compatible control Lyapunov function (CLF) and CBF pair are guaranteed to exist. Finally, we identify conditions under which a CLBF and a compatible CLF-CBF pair can be constructed from a non-compatible CLF-CBF pair. Throughout the paper, we intersperse different examples and counterexamples to motivate our results and position them within the state of the art.