Safety Control of Flat Systems Through Discrete Event Systems Abstraction

The limiting factor in most implementations of safety enforcing controllers is the model’s complexity, and a common work-around includes the abstraction of the physical model, based on differential equations, to a finite symbolic model. We exploit the specific structure of a class of systems (the differentially flat systems) to perform the abstraction. The objective is to construct a supervisor enforcing a set of safety rules, while imposing as little constraints as possible on the system’s functionality. We are applying these techniques to cooperative active safety systems and to systems of robotic manipulators with impacts, such as crane systems. We are currently extending these techniques to the case of imperfect state information and to more general dynamics.