Toward model-free safety-critical control with humans in the loop

Abstract

This vision article shows how to build on the framework of event-triggered Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to design model-free controllers for safety-critical multi-agent systems with unknown dynamics, including humans in the loop. This event-triggered framework has been shown to be computationally efficient and robust while guaranteeing safety for systems with unknown dynamics. We show how to extend it to model-free safety critical control where a controllable ego agent does not need to model the dynamics of other agents and updates its control based only on events dependent on the error states of agents obtained by real-time sensor measurements. To facilitate the process of real-time sensor measurements critical in this approach, we also present CBF relative degree reduction methods, which can reduce the number of such measurements. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on a multi-agent traffic merging decentralized control problem and on highway lane changing control with humans in the loop and relative degree reduction. We also compare the proposed event-driven method to the classical time-driven approach.