Model-Free Safety-Critical Control for Robotic Systems

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 - potentially complicated - high-fidelity dynamical model of the robot. Then, we track the safe velocity with a tracking controller. This culminates in model-free safety critical control. 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.

Automated summary

This letter presents a framework for safety-critical control of robotic systems based on safe regions in the configuration space. It synthesizes a safe velocity using the control barrier function theory without relying on a complicated dynamic model and tracks the safe velocity with a tracking controller. The proposed method provides theoretical safety guarantees and has been demonstrated to be application-agnostic.