Context-Conditioned Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability for Adaptive Safety Filtering

Abstract:Hamilton-Jacobi reachability constructs safety certificates for specified dynamics and safety constraints, tying each certificate to the deployment context for which it is synthesized. We ask whether a single certificate can instead represent a family of context-dependent safety problems and be queried across deployment conditions without re-synthesis. We learn a backward reachable tube for an eight-state vehicle model conditioned on local boundary geometry, friction coefficient, and adversarial disturbance scale. Geometry enters through an ego-frame boundary observation that defines the local containment constraint, while friction and disturbance scale enter as explicit operating-condition variables. This allows the same value function to be queried across friction coefficients from 0.4 to 2.0 and on geometries absent from synthesis. On 11 held-out evaluation geometries, the certificate maintains containment across the full tested friction range, including simultaneous geometry and grip shifts, while remaining within 1.2 percentage points in intervention rate and 0.09 m/s in speed of certificates re-synthesized with knowledge of the test geometry. We then deploy the certificate as a sampled discrete-time control barrier function filter on a full-scale vehicle near the handling limit. Lateral containment holds in every hardware session under both adversarial driving and autonomous racing, with 99th-percentile acceleration magnitude reaching 0.99 g. Across three certificates evaluated under a fixed autonomous racing controller, lap time varies by only 3.1%, demonstrating that a context-conditioned reachability certificate can transfer to deployment geometries absent from synthesis with modest performance cost.

Systems and Control (eess.SY); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.08115 [eess.SY]

(or arXiv:2610.08115v1 [eess.SY] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.08115 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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