Certifying the safety of nonlinear systems, through the lens of set invariance and control barrier functions (CBFs), offers a powerful method for controller synthesis, provided a CBF can be constructed. This paper draws connections between partial feedback linearization and CBF synthesis. We illustrate that when a control affine system is input-output linearizable with respect to a smooth output function, then, under mild regularity conditions, one may extend any safety constraint defined on the output to a CBF for the full-order dynamics. These more general results are specialized to robotic systems where the conditions required to synthesize CBFs simplify. The CBFs constructed from our approach are applied and verified in simulation and hardware experiments on a quadrotor.

翻译：通过集合不变性和控制屏障函数（CBF）的视角，认证非线性系统的安全性为控制器综合提供了一种强大方法，前提是能够构造出CBF。本文揭示了部分反馈线性化与CBF综合之间的联系。我们论证，当控制仿射系统关于光滑输出函数可实现输入-输出线性化时，在温和的正则性条件下，可以将定义在输出上的任意安全约束扩展为全阶动力学的CBF。这些更通用的结果可特化为机器人系统，其中合成CBF所需的条件得到简化。通过我们的方法构造的CBF已在一架四旋翼飞行器的仿真与硬件实验中应用并得到验证。