Related papers: Robust Estimator-Based Safety Verification: A Vect…
This paper generalizes the control barrier function framework by replacing scalar-valued functions with matrix-valued ones. Specifically, we develop barrier conditions for safe sets defined by matrix inequalities -- both semidefinite and…
Control systems operating in the real world face countless sources of unpredictable uncertainties. These random disturbances can render deterministic guarantees inapplicable and cause catastrophic safety failures. To overcome this, this…
Safety-critical applications require controllers/policies that can guarantee safety with high confidence. The control barrier function is a useful tool to guarantee safety if we have access to the ground-truth system dynamics. In practice,…
Guaranteeing the safety of controllers is vital for real-world applications, but is markedly difficult when the states are not perfectly known and when the control inputs are bounded. Backup control barrier functions (bCBFs) use predictions…
In the current control design of safety-critical autonomous systems, formal verification techniques are typically applied after the controller is designed to evaluate whether the required properties (e.g., safety) are satisfied. However,…
With the increasing need for safe control in the domain of autonomous driving, model-based safety-critical control approaches are widely used, especially Control Barrier Function (CBF)-based approaches. Among them, Exponential CBF (eCBF) is…
The existence of a Control Barrier Function (CBF) for a control-affine system provides a powerful design tool to ensure safety. Any controller that satisfies the CBF condition and ensures that the trajectories of the closed-loop system are…
In this paper, we propose a distributionally robust safety verification method for Markov decision processes where only an ambiguous transition kernel is available instead of the precise transition kernel. We define the ambiguity set around…
Ensuring safety in real-world robotic systems is often challenging due to unmodeled disturbances and noisy sensor measurements. To account for such stochastic uncertainties, many robotic systems leverage probabilistic state estimators such…
Ensuring safety for autonomous systems under uncertainty remains challenging, particularly when safety of the true state is required despite the true state not being fully known. Control barrier functions (CBFs) have become widely adopted…
We present a closed-form optimal control that satisfies both safety constraints (i.e., state constraints) and input constraints (e.g., actuator limits) using a composition of multiple control barrier functions (CBFs). This main contribution…
Control barrier functions guarantee safety but typically require accurate system models. Parametric uncertainty invalidates these guarantees. Existing robust methods maintain safety via worst-case bounds, limiting performance, while modular…
It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…
A predictive control barrier function (PCBF) based safety filter is a modular framework to verify safety of a control input by predicting a future trajectory. The approach relies on the solution of two optimization problems, first computing…
Safety-critical control is characterized as ensuring constraint satisfaction for a given dynamical system. Recent developments in zeroing control barrier functions (ZCBFs) have provided a framework for ensuring safety of a superlevel set of…
We introduce a type of safe extremum seeking (ES) controller, which minimizes an unknown objective function while also maintaining practical positivity of an unknown barrier function. We show semi-global practical asymptotic stability of…
This work proposes an algorithm to bound the minimum distance between points on trajectories of a dynamical system and points on an unsafe set. Prior work on certifying safety of trajectories includes barrier and density methods, which do…
In this paper, we consider the problem of safe control synthesis of general controlled nonlinear systems in the presence of bounded additive disturbances. Towards this aim, we first construct a governing augmented state space model…
A new framework is developed for control of constrained nonlinear systems with structured parametric uncertainties. Forward invariance of a safe set is achieved through online parameter adaptation and data-driven model estimation. The new…
Learning-based control has recently shown great efficacy in performing complex tasks for various applications. However, to deploy it in real systems, it is of vital importance to guarantee the system will stay safe. Control Barrier…