IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol.60, No.6, 1597-1610, 2015
Safety Controller Synthesis Using Human Generated Trajectories
This paper focuses on the task of safety controller synthesis, that is, designing a controller that will take a system from any point within a compact set of initial states to a point inside a set of acceptable goal states, while never entering any state that is deemed unsafe. To do this we use a human generated trajectory-based approach. We introduce the control autobisimulation function, which is the analog of the control Lyapunov function for approximate bisimulation. We consider a class of hybrid systems and use this function to determine a set of admissible feedback control laws that guarantee trajectory robustness for underlying dynamics that are linear affine, feedback linearizable, and differentially flat. This property ensures that any trajectory of the closed-loop system that is initialized within some neighborhood of a nominal trajectory will stay within some tube of the nominal trajectory when given the same input. This feedback control and input can be used as the controller for some subset of the initial states. We demonstrate how to combine multiple trajectories into a synthesized controller that satisfies the safety problem.