Abstract
Intelligent, autonomous systems are increasingly prevalent in today's society and will continue to proliferate. Many of these systems are critical, necessitating rigorous safety guarantees. However, designing and verifying safe controllers remains challenging, even for systems with linear dynamics.
This talk will focus on the design of safe control systems using a Control Barrier Function (CBF) approach. I will first present a new convex design method for linear systems, enabling the co-design of the controller and the barrier function. I will then extend the analysis to more complex scenarios, including systems with nonlinear dynamics, constraints, high relative degree, and model uncertainty.
Finally, I will consider the case of multi-agent systems, proposing a novel distributed control algorithm with parallel computation for enhanced safety. Recognizing that computational limitations may necessitate early termination, I will present a probabilistic result for guaranteeing safety.
This work is a collaborative effort with Dr. Han Wang and Professor Kostas Margellos.
Biographical Information
Antonis Papachristodoulou is the Professor in Control Engineering at the University of Oxford,
where he joined in 2006. He previously held a tutorial fellowship at Worcester College and served
as the director of the EPSRC & BBSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Synthetic Biology. He
earned his MA/MEng in Electrical and Information Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2000,
and his PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology, with a
minor in Aeronautics in 2005. Professor Papachristodoulou's research contributions in robustness
analysis, with applications to networked control systems and systems biology, have been recognized
with the European Control Award in 2014. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and has served on numerous
technical program committees for major conferences. He also served as associate editor for
Automatica and the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.