Control Barrier Function for Linearizable Systems with High Relative Degrees from Signal Temporal Logics: A Reference Governor Approach

Abstract: This paper considers the safety-critical navigation problem with Signal Temporal Logic (STL) tasks. We developed an explicit reference governor-guided control barrier function (ERG-guided CBF) method that enables the application of first-order CBFs to high-order linearizable systems. This method significantly reduces the conservativeness of the existing CBF approaches for high-order systems. Furthermore, our framework provides safety-critical guarantees in the sense of obstacle avoidance by constructing the margin of safety and updating direction of safe evolution in the agent's state space. To improve control performance and enhance STL satisfaction, we employ efficient gradient-based methods for iteratively learning optimal parameters of ERG-guided CBF. We validate the algorithm through both high-order linear and nonlinear systems. A video demonstration can be found on: \url{https://youtu.be/ZRmsA2FeFR4}