Dynamic Constraint Reconstruction Based Control Barrier Functions for Safety-Critical Control of High-Dimensional Manipulators

Abstract

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide formal safety guarantees for constrained nonlinear systems, but their effectiveness relies on accurate system dynamics. In high-dimensional manipulators subject to unknown disturbances and model uncertainties, fixed safety constraints constructed from nominal dynamics may become inconsistent with the actual system behavior, leading to safety degradation or excessive conservatism. This paper proposes a dynamic constraint reconstruction based control barrier function (DCR-CBF) framework for safety-critical control of disturbed robotic manipulators. An extended state observer is employed to estimate lumped disturbances online, and the estimated disturbance is incorporated into high-order control barrier functions to reconstruct safety constraints according to the estimated true dynamics. To address estimation inaccuracies, a safety margin is introduced, and a sufficient condition is derived to guarantee forward invariance under bounded estimation errors. Simulation studies on a 4-DOF excavation manipulator demonstrate that the proposed DCR-CBF method achieves zero safety violation under strong unknown disturbances while significantly improving trajectory-tracking performance compared with standard and robust CBF methods.