Disturbance Observer-based Robust Control Barrier Functions

Abstract

This work presents a safe control design approach that integrates the disturbance observer (DOB) and the control barrier function (CBF) for systems with external disturbances. Different from existing robust CBF results that consider the "worst case" of disturbances, this work utilizes a DOB to estimate and compensate for the disturbances. DOB-CBF-based controllers are constructed with provably safe guarantees by solving convex quadratic programs online, to achieve a better tradeoff between safety and performance. Two types of systems are considered individually depending on the magnitude of the input and disturbance relative degrees. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is illustrated via numerical simulations.