gatekeeper: Online Safety Verification and Control for Nonlinear Systems in Dynamic Environments

• Published in: Proceedings of the ... IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems pp. 259 - 266
• Main Authors: Agrawal, Devansh, Chen, Ruichang, Panagou, Dimitra
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2023
• Subjects: Control systems; Heuristic algorithms; Logic gates; Merging; Nonlinear dynamical systems; Real-time systems; Trajectory
• ISSN: 2153-0866
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10341790

This paper presents the gatekeeper algorithm, a real-time and computationally-lightweight method to ensure that nonlinear systems can operate safely in dynamic environments despite limited perception. gatekeeper integrates with existing path planners and feedback controllers by introducing an additional verification step that ensures that proposed trajectories can be executed safely, despite nonlinear dynamics subject to bounded disturbances, input constraints and partial knowledge of the environment. Our key contribution is that (A) we propose an algorithm to recursively construct committed trajectories, and (B) we prove that tracking the committed trajectory ensures the system is safe for all time into the future. The method is demonstrated on a complicated firefighting mission in a dynamic environment, and compares against the state-of-the-art techniques for similar problems.