Verification and Synthesis of Control Barrier Functions

Abstract: Control systems often must satisfy strict safety requirements over an extended operating lifetime. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are a promising recent approach to constructing simple and safe control policies. This paper proposes a framework for verifying that a CBF guarantees safety for all time and synthesizing CBFs with verifiable safety in polynomial control systems. Our approach is to show that safety of CBFs is equivalent to the non-existence of solutions to a family of polynomial equations, and then prove that this nonexistence is equivalent to a pair of sum-of-squares constraints via the Positivstellensatz of algebraic geometry. We develop this Positivstellensatz to verify CBFs, as well as generalization to high-degree systems and multiple CBF constraints. We then propose a set of heuristics for CBF synthesis, including a general alternating-descent heuristic, a specialized approach for compact safe regions, and an approach for convex unsafe regions. Our approach is illustrated on two numerical examples.