A Safety Guaranteed Control Framework to Integrate Actuator Dynamics via Control-Dependent Barrier Functions

Safety guaranteed control of dynamic systems is one of the most challenging tasks, especially for hierarchical systems. In a hierarchical system, existing control methods typically assume that the high-level control inputs can be ideally (or acceptably) executed by low-level actuators. Such an assumption is not reliable (or valid) for the safety control problem, in which the system-level safety highly relies on the component-level (or subsystem) performance. To address this issue, this paper introduces an integrated safety guaranteed control framework based on control-dependent barrier functions. By integrating the low-level actuator dynamics with the high-level safety guaranteed controller, the proposed framework eliminates low-level execution errors that can violate the high-level system safety constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated through hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiments for vehicle lane-keeping control.