Learning Control Barrier Functions with Deterministic Safety Guarantees

Abstract: Barrier functions (BFs) characterize safe sets of dynamical systems, where hard constraints are never violated as the system evolves over time. Computing a valid safe set and BF for a nonlinear (and potentially unmodeled), non-autonomous dynamical system is a difficult task. This work explores the design of BFs using data to obtain safe sets with deterministic assurances of control invariance. We leverage ReLU neural networks (NNs) to create continuous piecewise affine (CPA) BFs with deterministic safety guarantees for Lipschitz continuous, discrete-time dynamical system using sampled one-step trajectories. The CPA structure admits a novel classifier term to create a relaxed \ac{bf} condition and construction via a data driven constrained optimization. We use iterative convex overbounding (ICO) to solve this nonconvex optimization problem through a series of convex optimization steps. We then demonstrate our method's efficacy on two-dimensional autonomous and non-autonomous dynamical systems.