Data-Driven Synthesis of Safety Controllers via Multiple Control Barrier Certificates

This work proposes a data-driven framework to synthesize safety controllers for nonlinear systems with finite input sets and unknown mathematical models. The proposed scheme leverages new notions of multiple control barrier certificates (M-CBC) and provides controllers ensuring the safety of systems with confidence 1. While there may not exist a common control barrier certificate with a fixed template, our proposed technique adaptively partitions the state set to potentially find M-CBC of the same template for different regions. In the proposed data-driven framework, we first cast our proposed conditions of M-CBC as a robust optimization program (ROP). Given that the unknown model appears in some of the constraints of the ROP, we propose a sampling approach for collecting data and provide a scenario optimization program (SOP) associated with the proposed ROP. We solve the resulted SOP and construct M-CBC together with safety controllers for the unknown system with 100% correctness guarantee. We apply our results to a nonlinear jet engine compressor with unknown dynamics to illustrate the efficacy of our data-driven approach. In the case study, we show that while there exists no common polynomial-type control barrier certificate of a given degree, there exist polynomial-type M-CBC of the same degree by partitioning the state set to different regions.