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Related papers: Control Barrier Functions: Theory and Applications

200 papers

Safety is a critical property for control systems in medicine, transportation, manufacturing, and other applications, and can be defined as ensuring positive invariance of a predefined safe set. This paper investigates the problems of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-12 Andrew Clark

State and input constraints are ubiquitous in control system design. One recently developed tool to deal with these constraints is control barrier functions (CBF) which transform state constraints into conditions in the input space.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-07 Xiao Tan , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

In this paper, we introduce the notion of periodic safety, which requires that the system trajectories periodically visit a subset of a forward-invariant safe set, and utilize it in a multi-rate framework where a high-level planner…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-27 Kunal Garg , Ryan K. Cosner , Ugo Rosolia , Aaron D. Ames , Dimitra Panagou

In this paper, we analyze the system behavior for general nonlinear control-affine systems when a control barrier function-induced quadratic program-based controller is employed for feedback. In particular, we characterize the existence and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-11 Xiao Tan , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide a powerful framework for ensuring safety in dynamical systems. However, their application typically relies on full state information, which is often violated in real-world due to the availability of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-19 Vaishnavi Jagabathula , Ahan Basu , Pushpak Jagtap

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a rigorous framework for designing controllers enforcing safety constraints. While CBF theory is well-developed for a finite number of safety constraints, certain applications, e.g., backup CBFs,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-20 Max H. Cohen , Pio Ong , Pol Mestres , Aaron D. Ames

This paper aims to provide a clear and rigorous understanding of commonly recognized safety constraints in physical human-robot interaction, particularly regarding ISO/TS 15066. We investigate the derivation of these constraints, critically…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-03 Riccardo Zanella , Federico Califano , Stefano Stramigioli

Approximate controllability for a quantum system on a graph using as control parameters boundary conditions will be proven. This establishes a first theoretical proof of the feasibility of the quantum control at the boundary paradigm. A…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2019-10-10 Aitor Balmaseda

To navigate complex environments, robots must increasingly use high-dimensional visual feedback (e.g. images) for control. However, relying on high-dimensional image data to make control decisions raises important questions; particularly,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Mukun Tong , Charles Dawson , Chuchu Fan

This article provides an introduction to the theory of mechanism design and its application to engineering problems. Our aim is to provide the fundamental principles of the theory of mechanism design for control engineers and theorists…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-01-17 Ioannis Vasileios Chremos , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

Providing non-trivial certificates of safety for non-linear stochastic systems is an important open problem that limits the wider adoption of autonomous systems in safety-critical applications. One promising solution to address this problem…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-06 Frederik Baymler Mathiesen , Simeon Calvert , Luca Laurenti

We develop a novel adaptation-based technique for safe control design in the presence of multiple control barrier function (CBF) constraints. Specifically, we introduce an approach for synthesizing any number of candidate CBFs into one…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-20 Mitchell Black , Dimitra Panagou

Safety requirements in dynamical systems are commonly enforced with set invariance constraints over a safe region of the state space. Control barrier functions, which are Lyapunov-like functions for guaranteeing set invariance, are an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-01-22 Mohit Srinivasan , Matthew Abate , Gustav Nilsson , Samuel Coogan

Balancing safety and performance is one of the predominant challenges in modern control system design. Moreover, it is crucial to robustly ensure safety without inducing unnecessary conservativeness that degrades performance. In this work…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Anil Alan , Andrew J. Taylor , Chaozhe R. He , Aaron D. Ames , Gabor Orosz

Safety is one of the most crucial challenges of autonomous driving vehicles, and one solution to guarantee safety is to employ an additional control revision module after the planning backbone. Control Barrier Function (CBF) has been widely…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Zehang Zhu , Yuning Wang , Tianqi Ke , Zeyu Han , Shaobing Xu , Qing Xu , John M. Dolan , Jianqiang Wang

Recent years have seen significant progress in the realm of robot autonomy, accompanied by the expanding reach of robotic technologies. However, the emergence of new deployment domains brings unprecedented challenges in ensuring safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-13 Kai-Chieh Hsu , Haimin Hu , Jaime Fernández Fisac

Feedback optimization refers to a class of methods that steer a control system to a steady state that solves an optimization problem. Despite tremendous progress on the topic, an important problem remains open: enforcing state constraints…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-11 Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Pol Mestres , Jorge Cortés , W. P. M. H. Heemels

Control barrier functions (CBFs) offer an efficient framework for designing real-time safe controllers. However, CBF-based controllers can be short-sighted, resulting in poor performance, a behaviour which is aggravated in uncertain…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-16 Allan Andre do Nascimento , Antonis Papachristodoulou , Kostas Margellos

This paper presents a formal framework for collision avoidance in multi-robot systems, wherein an existing controller is modified in a minimally invasive fashion to ensure safety. We build this framework through the use of control barrier…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-05 Li Wang , Aaron Ames , Magnus Egerstedt

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide an effective framework for enforcing safety in dynamical systems with scalar constraints. However, many safety constraints are more naturally expressed as matrix-valued conditions, such as positive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Samuel G. Gessow , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames , Brett T. Lopez