Constructive Safety-Critical Control for a Class of Underactuated Systems: A Hierarchical Approach
The work develops a constructive framework for synthesizing safe control architectures and control barrier functions (CBFs) for underactuated systems, like quadrotors. It achieves this by geometrically characterizing natural layered architectures using shape maps and proposing a hierarchical synthesis procedure. The result is a closed-form CBF that guarantees safety if each layer meets specific performance criteria.