Dynamical Properties of Safety Filters for Linear Systems and Affine Control Barrier Functions

Abstract

This letter studies the dynamical properties of safety filters designed based on Control Barrier Functions (CBF). This mechanism, which is popular in safety-critical applications, takes a nominal controller and minimally modifies it to render it safe. Although CBF-based safety filters make the closed-loop system safe, characterizing their additional dynamical properties, such as stability, boundedness, or existence of spurious equilibria, remains a challenging problem. Here, we address this problem for the case of linear systems and an affine CBF constraint. We provide conditions under which the closed-loop system presents undesired equilibria, unbounded trajectories, or the origin is globally exponentially stable.