Safety-Critical Event-Triggered Control for Networked Control Systems Under Quantization and Time-Varying Delay

This article is concerned with the problem of safety-critical control for nonlinear systems under the event-triggered control paradigm. In networked control systems, the controller generates control inputs based on sampled data to ensure the safety and stability of the plant. However, the combined effects of quantization and time-varying delay introduced by digital communication networks have rarely been considered in safety-critical control. This article develops sufficient conditions for the design of safety and stabilizing control laws and provides explicit safety and input-to-state stability thresholds for networked control systems. In addition, we present provable extensions that can cope with the network-induced challenges mentioned above. In the context of periodic event-triggered mechanism, we formulate optimal control problems with constraints in the form of high-order control barrier functions and control Lyapunov functions. Finally, we apply the proposed strategy to adaptive cruise control, and illustrate that the event-based control approach effectively reduces communication traffic while achieving the control objectives.