Robust Safety Filters for Lipschitz-Bounded Adaptive Closed-Loop Systems With Structured Uncertainties

Abstract

Adaptive control provides closed-loop stability and reference tracking for uncertain dynamical systems through online parameter adaptation. These properties alone, however, do not ensure safety in the sense of forward invariance of state constraints, particularly during transient phases of adaptation. Control barrier function (CBF)–based safety filters have been proposed to address this limitation, but existing approaches often rely on conservative constraint tightening or static safety margins within quadratic program formulations. This letter proposes a reference-based adaptive safety framework for systems with structured parametric uncertainty that explicitly accounts for transient plant–reference mismatch. Safety is enforced at the reference level using a barrier-function-based filter, while adaptive control drives the plant to track the safety-certified reference. By exploiting Lipschitz bounds on the closed-loop tracking error dynamics, a tracking-error-dependent robust CBF condition is derived and equivalently reformulated as a convex second-order cone program (SOCP). The proposed safety-filter formulation reduces conservatism relative to fixed-margin CBF formulations by rendering the resulting safety constraints progressively less restrictive as the plant–reference tracking error decreases, while preserving formal guarantees of forward invariance and closed-loop stability.