2024/10/21 by Shuqi Wang, Wang, Shuqi, Wang, Siqi +4
Engineering · #Advanced Control Systems Optimization #FOS: Electrical engineering #Fault Detection and Control Systems #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.15660
openalex publication_date 2024/10/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate the problem of safe control synthesis for systems operating in environments with uncontrollable agents whose dynamics are unknown but coupled with those of the controlled system. This scenario naturally arises in various applications, such as autonomous driving and human-robot collaboration, where the behavior of uncontrollable agents, like pedestrians, cannot be directly controlled but is influenced by the actions of the autonomous vehicle or robot. In this paper, we present SPARC (Safe Prediction-Based Robust Controller for Coupled Agents), a novel framework designed to ensure safe control in the presence of coupled uncontrollable agents. SPARC leverages conformal prediction to quantify uncertainty in data-driven prediction of agent behavior. Particularly, we introduce a joint distribution-based approach to account for the coupled dynamics of the controlled system and uncontrollable agents. By integrating the control barrier function (CBF) technique, SPARC provides provable safety guarantees at a high confidence level. We illustrate our framework with a case study involving an autonomous driving scenario with walking pedestrians.