Feasibility Guaranteed Traffic Merging Control Using Control Barrier Functions

Abstract: We consider the merging control problem for Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) aiming to jointly minimize travel time and energy consumption while providing speed-dependent safety guarantees and satisfying velocity and acceleration constraints. Applying the joint optimal control and control barrier function (OCBF) method, a controller that optimally tracks the unconstrained optimal control solution while guaranteeing the satisfaction of all constraints is efficiently obtained by transforming the optimal tracking problem into a sequence of quadratic programs (QPs). However, these QPs can become infeasible, especially under tight control bounds, thus failing to guarantee safety constraints. We solve this problem by deriving a control-dependent feasibility constraint corresponding to each CBF constraint which is added to each QP and we show that each such modified QP is guaranteed to be feasible. Extensive simulations of the merging control problem illustrate the effectiveness of this feasibility guaranteed controller.