On Compatibility and Region of Attraction for Safe, Stabilizing Control Laws

A novel method is proposed to ensure stability and constraint satisfaction, i.e., “compatibility,” for nonlinear affine systems. We require an asymptotically stabilizing control law and a zeroing control barrier function, and define a region of attraction for which the proposed control safely stabilizes the system. Our methodology requires checking conditions of the system dynamics over the state space, which may be computationally expensive. To facilitate the search for compatibility, we extend the results to a class of nonlinear systems, including mechanical systems, for which a novel controller is designed to guarantee passivity, safety, and stability. The proposed technique is demonstrated using numerical examples.