Adaptive Safety-Critical Control for a Class of Nonlinear Systems with Parametric Uncertainties: A Control Barrier Function Approach

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for the safe control design of systems with parametric uncertainties in both drift terms and control-input matrices. The method combines control barrier functions and adaptive laws to generate a safe controller through a nonlinear program with an explicitly given closed-form solution. The proposed approach verifies the non-emptiness of the admissible control set independently of online parameter estimations, which can ensure the safe controller is singularity-free. A data-driven algorithm is also developed to improve the performance of the proposed controller by tightening the bounds of the unknown parameters. The effectiveness of the control scheme is demonstrated through numerical simulations.