Two books published from Hybrid & Networked Systems Group
New book1: Safe Autonomy with Control Barrier Functions
Wei Xiao, Christos G. Cassandras, Calin Belta, Safe Autonomy with Control Barrier Functions, Springer, 2023, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27576-0
About the book:
This book presents the concept of Control Barrier Function (CBF), which captures the evolution of safety requirements during the execution of a system and can be used to enforce safety. Safety is formalized using an emerging state-of-the-art approach based on CBFs, and many illustrative examples from autonomous driving, traffic control, and robot control are provided. Safety is central to autonomous systems since they are intended to operate with minimal or no human supervision, and a single failure could result in catastrophic results. The authors discuss how safety can be guaranteed via both theoretical and application perspectives. This presented method is computationally efficient and can be easily implemented in real-time systems that require high-frequency reactive control. In addition, the CBF approach can easily deal with nonlinear models and complex constraints used in a wide spectrum of applications, including autonomous driving, robotics, and traffic control. With the proliferation of autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars, mobile robots, and unmanned air vehicles, safety plays a crucial role in ensuring their widespread adoption. This book considers the integration of safety guarantees into the operation of such systems including typical safety requirements that involve collision avoidance, technological system limitations, and bounds on real-time executions. Adaptive approaches for safety are also proposed for time-varying execution bounds and noisy dynamics.
New book2: Adaptive and Learning-Based Control of Safety-Critical Systems
Max Cohen and Calin Belta, Adaptive and Learning-Based Control of Safety-Critical Systems, Springer, 2023, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29310-8
About the book:
This book stems from the growing use of learning-based techniques, such as reinforcement learning and adaptive control, in the control of autonomous and safety-critical systems. Safety is critical to many applications, such as autonomous driving, air traffic control, and robotics. As these learning-enabled technologies become more prevalent in the control of autonomous systems, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that such systems are safe. To address these challenges, the authors provide a self-contained treatment of learning-based control techniques with rigorous guarantees of stability and safety. This book contains recent results on provably correct control techniques from specifications that go beyond safety and stability, such as temporal logic formulas. The authors bring together control theory, optimization, machine learning, and formal methods and present worked-out examples and extensive simulation examples to complement the mathematical style of presentation. Prerequisites are minimal, and the underlying ideas are accessible to readers with only a brief background in control-theoretic ideas, such as Lyapunov stability theory.