Hierarchical Relaxation of Safety-critical Controllers: Mitigating Contradictory Safety Conditions with Application to Quadruped Robots

Understand

The safety-critical control of robotic systems often must account for multiple, potentially conflicting, safety constraints.

• This paper proposes novel relaxation techniques to address safety-critical control problems in the presence of conflicting safety conditions.
• In particular, Control Barrier Function (CBFs) provide a means to encode safety as constraints in a Quadratic Program (QP), wherein multiple safety conditions yield multiple constraints.
• However, the QP problem becomes infeasible when the safety conditions cannot be simultaneously satisfied.