No Arabic abstract
This paper considers the problem of safety controller synthesis for systems equipped with sensor modalities that can provide preview information. We consider switched systems where switching mode is an external signal for which preview information is available. In particular, it is assumed that the sensors can notify the controller about an upcoming mode switch before the switch occurs. We propose preview automaton, a mathematical construct that captures both the preview information and the possible constraints on switching signals. Then, we study safety control synthesis problem with preview information. An algorithm that computes the maximal invariant set in a given mode-dependent safe set is developed. These ideas are demonstrated on two case studies from autonomous driving domain.
Incorporating predictions of external inputs, which can otherwise be treated as disturbances, has been widely studied in control and computer science communities. These predictions are commonly referred to as preview in optimal control and lookahead in temporal logic synthesis. However, little work has been done for analyzing the value of preview information for safety control for systems with continuous state spaces. In this work, we start from showing general properties for discrete-time nonlinear systems with preview and strategies on how to determine a good preview time, and then we study a special class of linear systems, called systems in Brunovsky canonical form, and show special properties for this class of systems. In the end, we provide two numerical examples to further illustrate the value of preview in safety control.
This paper presents a constraint management strategy based on Scalar Reference Governors (SRG) to enforce output, state, and control constraints while taking into account the preview information of the reference and/or disturbances signals. The strategy, referred to as the Preview Reference Governor (PRG), can outperform SRG while maintaining the highly-attractive computational benefits of SRG. However, as it is shown, the performance of PRG may suffer if large preview horizons are used. An extension of PRG, referred to as Multi-horizon PRG, is proposed to remedy this issue. Quantitative comparisons between SRG, PRG, and Multi-horizon PRG on a one-link robot arm example are presented to illustrate their performance and computation time. Furthermore, extensions of PRG are presented to handle systems with disturbance preview and multi-input systems. The robustness of PRG to parametric uncertainties and inaccurate preview information is also explored.
Control barrier functions have shown great success in addressing control problems with safety guarantees. These methods usually find the next safe control input by solving an online quadratic programming problem. However, model uncertainty is a big challenge in synthesizing controllers. This may lead to the generation of unsafe control actions, resulting in severe consequences. In this paper, we develop a learning framework to deal with system uncertainty. Our method mainly focuses on learning the dynamics of the control barrier function, especially for high relative degree with respect to a system. We show that for each order, the time derivative of the control barrier function can be separated into the time derivative of the nominal control barrier function and a remainder. This implies that we can use a neural network to learn the remainder so that we can approximate the dynamics of the real control barrier function. We show by simulation that our method can generate safe trajectories under parametric uncertainty using a differential drive robot model.
Control schemes for autonomous systems are often designed in a way that anticipates the worst case in any situation. At runtime, however, there could exist opportunities to leverage the characteristics of specific environment and operation context for more efficient control. In this work, we develop an online intermittent-control framework that combines formal verification with model-based optimization and deep reinforcement learning to opportunistically skip certain control computation and actuation to save actuation energy and computational resources without compromising system safety. Experiments on an adaptive cruise control system demonstrate that our approach can achieve significant energy and computation savings.
This paper deals with the lateral control of a convoy of autonomous and connected following vehicles (ACVs) for executing an Emergency Lane Change (ELC) maneuver. Typically, an ELC maneuver is triggered by emergency cues from the front or the end of convoy as a response to either avoiding an obstacle or making way for other vehicles to pass. From a safety viewpoint, connectivity of ACVs is essential as it entails obtaining or exchanging information about other ACVs in the convoy. This paper assumes that ACVs have reliable connectivity and that every following ACV has the information about GPS position traces of the lead and immediately preceding vehicles in the convoy. This information provides a discretized preview of the trajectory to be tracked. Based on the available information, this article focuses on two schemes for synthesizing lateral control of ACVs based on(a) a single composite ELC trajectory that fuses lead and preceding vehicles GPS traces and (b) separate ELC trajectories based on preview data of preceding and lead vehicles. The former case entails the construction of a single composite ELC trajectory, determine the cross-track error, heading and yaw rate errors with respect to this trajectory and synthesize a lateral control action. The latter case entails the construction of two separate trajectories corresponding to the lead vehicles and preceding vehicles data separately and the subsequent computation of two sets of associated errors and lateral control actions and combining them to provide a steering command. Numerical and experimental results corroborate the effectiveness of these two schemes.