Safety Index Synthesis with State-dependent Control Space

Abstract: This paper introduces an approach for synthesizing feasible safety indices to derive safe control laws under state-dependent control spaces. The problem, referred to as Safety Index Synthesis (SIS), is challenging because it requires the existence of feasible control input in all states and leads to an infinite number of constraints. The proposed method leverages Positivstellensatz to formulate SIS as a nonlinear programming (NP) problem. We formally prove that the NP solutions yield safe control laws with two imperative guarantees: forward invariance within user-defined safe regions and finite-time convergence to those regions. A numerical study validates the effectiveness of our approach.