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Related papers: Adaptive Safety with Control Barrier Functions

200 papers

Stabilizing controller design and region of attraction (RoA) estimation are essential in nonlinear control. Moreover, it is challenging to implement a control Lyapunov function (CLF) in practice when only partial knowledge of the system is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-20 Shiqing Wei , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

Motivated by the key role of control barrier functions (CBFs) in assessing safety and enabling the synthesis of safe controllers in nonlinear control systems, this paper presents a suite of converse results on CBFs. Given any safe set, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-13 Pol Mestres , Jorge Cortés

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) enforce safety by rendering a prescribed safe set forward invariant. However, standard CBFs are limited to safety constraints with relative degree one, while High-Order CBF (HOCBF) methods address higher…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-22 Jianye Xu , Bassam Alrifaee

We present a true-dynamics-agnostic, statistically rigorous framework for establishing exponential stability and safety guarantees of closed-loop, data-driven nonlinear control. Central to our approach is the novel concept of conformal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-12 Ting-Wei Hsu , Hiroyasu Tsukamoto

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be particularly effective in solving complex decision-making problems for a wide range of applications. Safe reinforcement learning refers to a class of constrained problems where the constraint…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-13 Dhruv Singh Kushwaha , Zoleikha Abdollahi Biron

This paper considers safe control synthesis for dynamical systems with either probabilistic or worst-case uncertainty in both the dynamics model and the safety constraints. We formulate novel probabilistic and robust (worst-case) control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Kehan Long , Vikas Dhiman , Melvin Leok , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

In this paper, we present a novel probabilistic safe control framework for human-robot interaction that combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with conformal risk control to provide formal safety guarantees while considering complex…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Jake Gonzales , Kazuki Mizuta , Karen Leung , Lillian J. Ratliff

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool to enforce safety of a control system. CBFs are commonly utilized in a quadratic program formulation (CBF-QP) as safety-critical constraints. A class $\mathcal{K}$ function in CBFs…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-12 Hengbo Ma , Bike Zhang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Koushil Sreenath

In safety-critical control, managing safety constraints with high relative degrees and uncertain obstacle dynamics pose significant challenges in guaranteeing safety performance. Robust Control Barrier Functions (RCBFs) offer a potential…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-06 Kwang Hak Kim , Mamadou Diagne , Miroslav Krstić

We consider the problem of designing controllers to guarantee safety in a class of nonlinear systems under uncertainties in the system dynamics and/or the environment. We define a class of uncertain control barrier functions (CBFs), and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-20 Vipul K. Sharma , S. Sivaranjani

This paper proposes a safety-critical control design approach for nonlinear control affine systems in the presence of matched and unmatched uncertainties. Our constructive framework couples control barrier function (CBF) theory with a new…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-03 Ersin Das , Joel W. Burdick

Design and analysis of stabilizing controllers with safety guarantees for nonlinear systems have received considerable attention in recent years. Control Lyapunov-barrier functions (CLBFs) provide a powerful framework for simultaneously…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Yiming Meng , Jun Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) exhibits impressive performance when managing complicated control tasks for robots. However, its wide application to physical robots is limited by the absence of strong safety guarantees. To overcome this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Desong Du , Shaohang Han , Naiming Qi , Haitham Bou Ammar , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

Using control barrier functions (CBFs) as safety filters provides a computationally inexpensive yet effective method for constructing controllers in safety-critical applications. However, using CBFs requires the construction of a valid CBF,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Bolun Dai , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be an effective tool for performing safe control synthesis for nonlinear systems. However, guaranteeing safety in the presence of disturbances and input constraints for high relative degree…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Luzia Knoedler , Oswin So , Ji Yin , Mitchell Black , Zachary Serlin , Panagiotis Tsiotras , Javier Alonso-Mora , Chuchu Fan

Control barrier function (CBF)-based methods provide the minimum modification necessary to formally guarantee safety in the context of quadratic programming, and strict safety guarantee for safety critical systems. However, most CBF-related…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-27 Xiaoxiao Li , Zhirui Sun , Hongpeng Wang , Shuai Li , Jiankun Wang

This paper focuses on safety filters designed based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs): these are modifications of a nominal stabilizing controller typically utilized in safety-critical control applications to render a given subset of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-17 Pol Mestres , Yiting Chen , Emiliano Dall'anese , Jorge Cortés

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

This manuscript considers the problem of ensuring stability and safety during formation control with distributed multi-agent systems in the presence of parametric uncertainty in the dynamics and limited communication. We propose an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-24 Jose A. Solano-Castellanos , Peter A. Fisher , Anuradha Annaswamy