Analysis and Design of Safe Control Laws

Semi-plenary Lecture by Antonis Papachristodoulou at ECC 2025.

Abstract:
Intelligent, autonomous systems are increasingly prevalent in today’s society and will continue to proliferate. Many of these systems are critical, necessitating rigorous safety guarantees. However, designing and verifying safe controllers remains challenging, even for systems with linear dynamics.
This talk will focus on the design of safe control systems using a Control Barrier Function (CBF) approach, which ensure forward invariance of safe sets. I will first present a new convex design method for linear systems, enabling the co-design of the controller and the barrier function. I will then extend the analysis to more complex scenarios, including systems with nonlinear dynamics, constraints, high relative degree, and model uncertainty.
Finally, I will consider the case of multi-agent systems, proposing a novel distributed control algorithm with parallel computation for enhanced safety. Recognizing that computational limitations may necessitate early termination, I will present a probabilistic result for guaranteeing safety.
This work is a collaborative effort with Dr. Han Wang and Professors Kostas Margellos and Claudio de Persis.

Bio:
Antonis joined the University of Oxford in 2006, where he is currently the University’s Statutory Professor in Control Engineering and a fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. Previously, he was a tutorial fellow at Worcester College, as well as an EPSRC fellow and the director of the EPSRC & BBSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in synthetic biology.

Antonis obtained an MA/MEng degree in Electrical and Information Sciences from the University of Cambridge, before completing a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology, with a PhD minor in Aeronautics. In 2015 he was awarded the European Control Award for his contributions to robustness analysis and applications to networked control systems and systems biology, as well as the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award.

Antonis is an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to the analysis and design of networked control systems. He serves regularly on Technical Programme Committees for conferences and was associate editor for Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. In 2024 he served as Programme co-chair for the European Control Conference and co-chair for the conference on Learning for Decision and Control.