Practical Safe Extremum Seeking with Assignable Rate of Attractivity to the Safe Set

Alan Williams, Miroslav Krstic, Alexander Scheinker

Published 2024-04-12Version 1

We present Assignably Safe Extremum Seeking (ASfES), an algorithm designed to minimize a measured objective function while maintaining a measured metric of safety (a control barrier function or CBF) be positive in a practical sense. We ensure that for trajectories with safe initial conditions, the violation of safety can be made arbitrarily small with appropriately chosen design constants. We also guarantee an assignable ``attractivity'' rate: from unsafe initial conditions, the trajectories approach the safe set, in the sense of the measured CBF, at a rate no slower than a user-assigned rate. Similarly, from safe initial conditions, the trajectories approach the unsafe set, in the sense of the CBF, no faster than the assigned attractivity rate. The feature of assignable attractivity is not present in the semiglobal version of safe extremum seeking, where the semiglobality of convergence is achieved by slowing the adaptation. We also demonstrate local convergence of the parameter to a neighborhood of the minimum of the objective function constrained to the safe set. The ASfES algorithm and analysis are multivariable, but we also extend the algorithm to a Newton-Based ASfES scheme (NB-ASfES) which we show is only useful in the scalar case. The proven properties of the designs are illustrated through simulation examples.