A Nonlinear Scaling-based Design of Control Lyapunov-barrier Function for Relative Degree 2 Case and its Application to Safe Feedback Linearization

Abstract: In this paper we address the problem of control Lyapunov-barrier function (CLBF)-based safe stabilization for a class of nonlinear control-affine systems. A difficulty may arise for the case when a constraint has the relative degree larger than 1, at which computing a proper CLBF is not straightforward. Instead of adding an (possibly non-existent) control barrier function (CBF) to a control Lyapunov function (CLF), our key idea is to simply scale the value of the CLF on the unsafe set, by utilizing a sigmoid function as a scaling factor. We provide a systematic design method for the CLBF, with a detailed condition for the parameters of the sigmoid function to satisfy. It is also seen that the proposed approach to the CLBF design can be applied to the problem of task-space control for a planar robot manipulator with guaranteed safety, for which a safe feedback linearization-based controller is presented.