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Related papers: Control Barrier Functions: Theory and Applications

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Safety-critical whole-body robot control demands reactive methods that ensure collision avoidance in real-time. Complementarity constraints and control barrier functions (CBF) have emerged as core tools for ensuring such safety constraints,…

This work applies universal adaptive control to control barrier functions to achieve forward invariance of a safe set despite the presence of unmatched parametric uncertainties. The approach combines two ideas. The first is to construct a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-08-17 Brett T. Lopez , Jean-Jacques Slotine

The control barrier function (CBF) has become a fundamental tool in safety-critical systems design since its invention. Typically, the quadratic optimization framework is employed to accommodate CBFs, control Lyapunov functions (CLFs),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Junjun Xie , Liang Hu , Jiahu Qin , Jun Yang , Huijun Gao

Control barrier functions are widely used to enforce safety properties in robot motion planning and control. However, the problem of constructing barrier functions online and synthesizing safe controllers that can deal with the associated…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Kehan Long , Cheng Qian , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

Safe autonomy is important in many application domains, especially for applications involving interactions with humans. Existing safe control algorithms are similar to one another in the sense that: they all provide control inputs to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-10-30 Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

This paper presents a comprehensive approach for the safety-critical control of robotic manipulators operating in dynamic environments. Building upon the framework of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), we extend the collision cone…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Lucas Almeida

Despite significant advancement in technology, communication and computational failures are still prevalent in safety-critical engineering applications. Often, networked control systems experience packet dropouts, leading to open-loop…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-05 Marc Seidel , Mahathi Anand , Frank Allgöwer

This paper studies the problem of enforcing safety of a stochastic dynamical system over a finite-time horizon. We use stochastic control barrier functions as a means to quantify the probability that a system exits a given safe region of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-09-12 Cesar Santoyo , Maxence Dutreix , Samuel Coogan

This paper introduces integral control barrier functions (I-CBFs) as a means to enable the safety-critical integral control of nonlinear systems. Importantly, I-CBFs allow for the holistic encoding of both state constraints and input bounds…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-09 Aaron D. Ames , Gennaro Notomista , Yorai Wardi , Magnus Egerstedt

In order to be effective partners for humans, robots must become increasingly comfortable with making contact with their environment. Unfortunately, it is hard for robots to distinguish between ``just enough'' and ``too much'' force: some…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Charles Dawson , Austin Garrett , Falk Pollok , Yang Zhang , Chuchu Fan

Control barrier functions are a popular method of ensuring system safety, and these functions can be used to enforce invariance of a set under the dynamics of a system. A control barrier function must have certain properties, and one must…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-12-02 Ellie Pond , Matthew Hale

In this paper, a method to achieve smooth transitions between sequential reachability tasks for a continuous time mobile robotic system is presented. Control barrier functions provide formal guarantees of forward invariance of safe sets and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-27 Mohit Srinivasan , Cesar Santoyo , Samuel Coogan

This paper presents a new approach for guaranteed safety subject to input constraints (e.g., actuator limits) using a composition of multiple control barrier functions (CBFs). First, we present a method for constructing a single CBF from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-10 Pedram Rabiee , Jesse B. Hoagg

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a powerful tool for the constrained control of nonlinear systems; however, the majority of results in the literature focus on systems subject to a single CBF constraint, making it challenging to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-05 Max H. Cohen , Eugene Lavretsky , Aaron D. Ames

We consider the problem of guaranteeing that the transient voltages and currents stay within prescribed bounds in Direct Current (DC) microgrids, when the controller does not have access to accurate system dynamics due to the load being…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-02-05 K. C. Kosaraju , S. Sivaranjani , V. Gupta

This paper considers the general problem of transitioning theoretically safe controllers to hardware. Concretely, we explore the application of control barrier functions (CBFs) to sampled-data systems: systems that evolve continuously but…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-14 Andrew Singletary , Yuxiao Chen , Aaron D. Ames

Using a port-Hamiltonian formalism, we show the qualitative and quantitative effect of safety-critical control implemented with control barrier functions (CBFs) on the power balance of controlled physical systems. The presented results will…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-29 Federico Califano , Riccardo Zanella , Alessandro Macchelli , Stefano Stramigioli

This paper presents a framework for the safety-critical control of robotic systems, when safety is defined on safe regions in the configuration space. To maintain safety, we synthesize a safe velocity based on control barrier function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Tamas G. Molnar , Ryan K. Cosner , Andrew W. Singletary , Wyatt Ubellacker , Aaron D. Ames

Safety critical systems involve the tight coupling between potentially conflicting control objectives and safety constraints. As a means of creating a formal framework for controlling systems of this form, and with a view toward automotive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-27 Aaron D. Ames , Xiangru Xu , Jessy W. Grizzle , Paulo Tabuada

This paper presents a novel approach for synthesizing control barrier functions (CBFs) from high relative degree safety constraints: Rectified CBFs (ReCBFs). We begin by discussing the limitations of existing High-Order CBF approaches and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-06 Pio Ong , Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames