2,967 research outputs found
Control Barrier Function Based Quadratic Programs for Safety Critical Systems
Safety critical systems involve the tight coupling between potentially
conflicting control objectives and safety constraints. As a means of creating a
formal framework for controlling systems of this form, and with a view toward
automotive applications, this paper develops a methodology that allows safety
conditions -- expressed as control barrier functions -- to be unified with
performance objectives -- expressed as control Lyapunov functions -- in the
context of real-time optimization-based controllers. Safety conditions are
specified in terms of forward invariance of a set, and are verified via two
novel generalizations of barrier functions; in each case, the existence of a
barrier function satisfying Lyapunov-like conditions implies forward invariance
of the set, and the relationship between these two classes of barrier functions
is characterized. In addition, each of these formulations yields a notion of
control barrier function (CBF), providing inequality constraints in the control
input that, when satisfied, again imply forward invariance of the set. Through
these constructions, CBFs can naturally be unified with control Lyapunov
functions (CLFs) in the context of a quadratic program (QP); this allows for
the achievement of control objectives (represented by CLFs) subject to
conditions on the admissible states of the system (represented by CBFs). The
mediation of safety and performance through a QP is demonstrated on adaptive
cruise control and lane keeping, two automotive control problems that present
both safety and performance considerations coupled with actuator bounds
Discrete mechanics and optimal control: An analysis
The optimal control of a mechanical system is of crucial importance in many application areas. Typical examples are the determination of a time-minimal path in vehicle dynamics, a minimal energy trajectory in space mission design, or optimal motion sequences in robotics and biomechanics. In most cases, some sort of discretization of the original, infinite-dimensional optimization problem has to be performed in order to make the problem amenable to computations. The approach proposed in this paper is to directly discretize the variational description of the system's motion. The resulting optimization algorithm lets the discrete solution directly inherit characteristic structural properties from the continuous one like symmetries and integrals of the motion. We show that the DMOC (Discrete Mechanics and Optimal Control) approach is equivalent to a finite difference discretization of Hamilton's equations by a symplectic partitioned Runge-Kutta scheme and employ this fact in order to give a proof of convergence. The numerical performance of DMOC and its relationship to other existing optimal control methods are investigated
Optimal mixing enhancement
We introduce a general-purpose method for optimising the mixing rate of
advective fluid flows. An existing velocity field is perturbed in a
neighborhood to maximize the mixing rate for flows generated by velocity fields
in this neighborhood. Our numerical approach is based on the infinitesimal
generator of the flow and is solved by standard linear programming methods. The
perturbed flow may be easily constrained to preserve the same steady state
distribution as the original flow, and various natural geometric constraints
can also be simply applied. The same technique can also be used to optimize the
mixing rate of advection-diffusion flow models by manipulating the drift term
in a small neighborhood
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