Feasibility-Guided Learning for Robust Control in Constrained Optimal Control Problems

Abstract: Optimal control problems with constraints ensuring safety and convergence to desired states can be mapped onto a sequence of real time optimization problems through the use of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs). One of the main challenges in these approaches is ensuring the feasibility of the resulting quadratic programs (QPs) if the system is affine in controls. The recently proposed penalty method has the potential to improve the existence of feasible solutions to such problems. In this paper, we further improve the feasibility robustness (i.e., feasibility maintenance in the presence of time-varying and unknown unsafe sets) through the definition of a High Order CBF (HOCBF) that works for arbitrary relative degree constraints; this is achieved by a proposed feasibility-guided learning approach. Specifically, we apply machine learning techniques to classify the parameter space of a HOCBF into feasible and infeasible sets, and get a differentiable classifier that is then added to the learning process. The proposed feasibility-guided learning approach is compared with the gradient-descent method on a robot control problem. The simulation results show an improved ability of the feasibility-guided learning approach over the gradient-decent method to determine the optimal parameters in the definition of a HOCBF for the feasibility robustness, as well as show the potential of the CBF method for robot safe navigation in an unknown environment.