Model-Free Safety-Critical Control for Robotic Systems

Abstract

This letter presents a framework for the safety-critical control of robotic systems, when safety is defined on safe regions in the configuration space. To maintain safety, we synthesize a safe velocity based on control barrier function theory without relying on a &#x2013; potentially complicated &#x2013; high-fidelity dynamical model of the robot. Then, we track the safe velocity with a tracking controller. This culminates in <i>model-free safety critical control</i>. We prove theoretical safety guarantees for the proposed method. Finally, we demonstrate that this approach is application-agnostic. We execute an obstacle avoidance task with a Segway in high-fidelity simulation, as well as with a Drone and a Quadruped in hardware experiments.