Control and safety of fully actuated and underactuated nonlinear systems: from adaptation to robustness to optimality

The state-of-the-art quadratic program-based control Lyapunov-control barrier function (QP-CLBF) is a powerful control approach to balance safety and stability in a pointwise optimal fashion. However, under this approach, modeling inaccuracies may degrade the performance of closed-loop systems and cause a violation of safety-critical constraints. This thesis extends the recently-developed QP-CLBF through the derivation of five novel robust quadratic program-based adaptive control approaches for fully actuated and underactuated nonlinear systems with a view toward adapting to unknown parameters, being robust to unmodeled dynamics and disturbances, ensuring the system remains in safe sets and being optimal with respect in a pointwise fashion. Simulation and quantitative results demonstrate the superiority of proposed approaches over the baseline methods.Ph.D