Control Synthesis for Stability and Safety by Differential Complementarity Problem

This letter develops a novel control synthesis method for safe stabilization of control-affine systems as a Differential Complementarity Problem (DCP). Our design uses a control Lyapunov function (CLF) and a control barrier function (CBF) to define complementarity constraints in the DCP formulation to certify stability and safety, respectively. The CLF-CBF-DCP controller imposes stability as a soft constraint, which is automatically relaxed when the safety constraint is active, without the need for parameter tuning or optimization. We study the closed-loop system behavior with the CLF-CBF-DCP controller and identify conditions on the existence of local equilibria. Although in certain cases the controller yields undesirable local equilibria, those can be confined to a small subset of the safe set boundary by proper choice of the control parameters. Then, our method can avoid undesirable equilibria that CLF-CBF quadratic programming techniques encounter.