From a Single Trajectory to Safety Controller Synthesis of Discrete-Time Nonlinear Polynomial Systems

Abstract

This letter is concerned with developing a data-driven approach for learning control barrier certificates (CBCs) and associated safety controllers for discrete-time input-affine nonlinear systems with polynomial dynamics with (partially) unknown mathematical models, guaranteeing system safety over an infinite time horizon. The proposed approach leverages measured data acquired through an input-state observation, referred to as a single trajectory, collected over a specified time horizon. By fulfilling a certain rank condition, which ensures the unknown system is persistently excited by the collected data, we design a CBC and its corresponding safety controller directly from the finite-length observed data, without explicitly identifying the unknown dynamical system. This is achieved through proposing a data-based sum-of-squares optimization (SOS) program to systematically design CBCs and their safety controllers. We validate our data-driven approach over two physical case studies including a jet engine and a Lorenz system, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed method.