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Guaranteeing safe behaviour of reinforcement learning (RL) policies poses significant challenges for safety-critical applications, despite RL's generality and scalability. To address this, we propose a new approach to apply verification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Daniel C. H. Tan , Fernando Acero , Robert McCarthy , Dimitrios Kanoulas , Zhibin Li

Obstacle avoidance is central to safe navigation, especially for robots with arbitrary and nonconvex geometries operating in cluttered environments. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) approaches often rely on analytic clearance…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shuo Liu , Zhe Huang , Calin A. Belta

Modern autonomous systems, such as flying, legged, and wheeled robots, are generally characterized by high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics, which presents challenges for model-based safety-critical control design. Motivated by the success of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-21 Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Athindran Ramesh Kumar , Sulin Liu , Jaime F. Fisac , Ryan P. Adams , Peter J. Ramadge

This paper presents a novel approach for safe control synthesis using the dual formulation of the navigation problem. The main contribution of this paper is in the analytical construction of density functions for almost everywhere…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Andrew Zheng , Sriram S. K. S. Narayanan , Umesh Vaidya

This paper proposes a distributed controller synthesis framework for safe navigation of multi-agent systems. We leverage control barrier functions to formulate collision avoidance with obstacles and teammates as constraints on the control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-03 Pol Mestres , Carlos Nieto-Granda , Jorge Cortés

Safety filters leveraging control barrier functions (CBFs) are highly effective for enforcing safe behavior on complex systems. It is often easier to synthesize CBFs for a Reduced order Model (RoM), and track the resulting safe behavior on…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-09 William D. Compton , Max H. Cohen , Aaron D. Ames

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

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Cesar Santoyo , Maxence Dutreix , Samuel Coogan

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

This paper presents a new control approach for guaranteed safety (remaining in a safe set) subject to actuator constraints (the control is in a convex polytope). The control signals are computed using real-time optimization, including…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-13 Pedram Rabiee , Jesse B. Hoagg

This paper investigates the safety guaranteed problem in spacecraft inspection missions, considering multiple position obstacles and logical attitude forbidden zones. In order to address this issue, we propose a control strategy based on…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-09 Kun Wang , Tao Meng , Jiakun Lei , Weijia Wang

The Robotarium, a remotely accessible swarm-robotics testbed, has provided free, open access to robotics and controls research for hundreds of users in thousands of experiments. This high level of usage requires autonomy in the system,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Yousef Emam , Paul Glotfelter , Magnus Egerstedt

In this work, we consider the problem of designing a safety filter for a nonlinear uncertain control system. Our goal is to augment an arbitrary controller with a safety filter such that the overall closed-loop system is guaranteed to stay…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Angela P. Schoellig

In human-robot collaboration (HRC), software-based automatic safety controllers (ASCs) are used in various forms (e.g. shutdown mechanisms, emergency brakes, interlocks) to improve operational safety. Complex robotic tasks and increasingly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Mario Gleirscher , Radu Calinescu

Shared autonomy blends operator intent with autonomous assistance. In cluttered environments, linear blending can produce unsafe commands even when each source is individually collision-free. Many existing approaches model obstacle…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Berk Guler , Kay Pompetzki , Yuanzheng Sun , Simon Manschitz , Jan Peters

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-10 Pol Mestres , Blake Werner , Ryan K. Cosner , Aaron D. Ames

Control systems often need to satisfy strict safety requirements. Safety index provides a handy way to evaluate the safety level of the system and derive the resulting safe control policies. However, designing safety index functions under…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Weiye Zhao , Tairan He , Tianhao Wei , Simin Liu , Changliu Liu

Safe control in unknown environments is a significant challenge in robotics. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are widely used to guarantee system safety, they often assume known environments with predefined obstacles. The proposed…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Golnaz Raja , Teemu Mökkönen , Reza Ghabcheloo

Hybrid dynamical systems are ubiquitous as practical robotic applications often involve both continuous states and discrete switchings. Safety is a primary concern for hybrid robotic systems. Existing safety-critical control approaches for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Shuo Yang , Yu Chen , Xiang Yin , George J. Pappas , Rahul Mangharam

Model mismatches prevail in real-world applications. Ensuring safety for systems with uncertain dynamic models is critical. However, existing robust safe controllers may not be realizable when control limits exist. And existing methods use…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Tianhao Wei , Shucheng Kang , Weiye Zhao , Changliu Liu