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Among the promising approaches to enforce safety in control systems, learning Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) from expert demonstrations has emerged as an effective strategy. However, a critical challenge remains: verifying that the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Sumeadh MS , Kevin Dsouza , Ravi Prakash

This paper presents an adaptive control approach for uncertain nonlinear systems subject to safety constraints that allows for modularity in the selection of the parameter estimation algorithm. Such modularity is achieved by unifying the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-09 Max Cohen , Calin Belta

Breaking safety constraints in control systems can lead to potential risks, resulting in unexpected costs or catastrophic damage. Nevertheless, uncertainty is ubiquitous, even among similar tasks. In this paper, we develop a novel adaptive…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-17 Shengbo Wang , Ke Li , Yin Yang , Yuting Cao , Tingwen Huang , Shiping Wen

Correct-by-construction techniques, such as control barrier functions (CBFs), can be used to guarantee closed-loop safety by acting as a supervisor of an existing or legacy controller. However, supervisory-control intervention typically…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-05-03 Yuxiao Chen , Ayonga Hereid , Huei Peng , Jessy Grizzle

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

Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to develop feedback controllers that endow systems with properties such as safety and stability. The guarantees ensured by these controllers often rely on accurate estimates of the system state for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-02 Sarah Dean , Andrew J. Taylor , Ryan K. Cosner , Benjamin Recht , Aaron D. Ames

Deploying safety-critical controllers in practice necessitates the ability to modulate uncertainties in control systems. In this context, robust control barrier functions -- in a variety of forms -- have been used to obtain safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-22 Anil Alan , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames , Gábor Orosz

It has been shown that optimizing quadratic costs while stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states subject to state and control constraints can be reduced to a sequence of Quadratic Programs (QPs) by using Control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-17 Wei Xiao , Christos G. Cassandras , Calin A. Belta

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have recently been introduced as a systematic tool to ensure safety by establishing set invariance. When combined with a control Lyapunov function (CLF), they form a safety-critical control mechanism.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-22 Mohammad Aali , Jun Liu

This paper develops rollover prevention guarantees for mobile robots using control barrier function (CBF) theory, and demonstrates the method experimentally. We consider a safety measure based on a zero moment point condition through the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-18 Ersin Das , Aaron D. Ames , Joel W. Burdick

To bring complex systems into real world environments in a safe manner, they will have to be robust to uncertainties - both in the environment and the system. This paper investigates the safety of control systems under input disturbances,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-03 Anil Alan , Andrew J. Taylor , Chaozhe R. He , Gábor Orosz , Aaron D. Ames

This paper addresses learning safe output feedback control laws from partial observations of expert demonstrations. We assume that a model of the system dynamics and a state estimator are available along with corresponding error bounds,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-04 Lars Lindemann , Alexander Robey , Lejun Jiang , Satyajeet Das , Stephen Tu , Nikolai Matni

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

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

Learning-based methods for constructing control barrier functions (CBFs) are gaining popularity for ensuring safe robot control. A major limitation of existing methods is their reliance on extensive sampling over the state space or online…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-17 Hongzhan Yu , Seth Farrell , Ryo Yoshimitsu , Zhizhen Qin , Henrik I. Christensen , Sicun Gao

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have become powerful tools for ensuring safety in nonlinear systems. However, finding valid CBFs that guarantee persistent safety and feasibility remains an open challenge, especially in systems with input…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Taekyung Kim , Robin Inho Kee , Dimitra Panagou

Learning-based control approaches have shown great promise in performing complex tasks directly from high-dimensional perception data for real robotic systems. Nonetheless, the learned controllers can behave unexpectedly if the trajectories…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Fernando Castañeda , Haruki Nishimura , Rowan McAllister , Koushil Sreenath , Adrien Gaidon

Many modern nonlinear control methods aim to endow systems with guaranteed properties, such as stability or safety, and have been successfully applied to the domain of robotics. However, model uncertainty remains a persistent challenge,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Andrew J. Taylor , Victor D. Dorobantu , Hoang M. Le , Yisong Yue , Aaron D. Ames

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are a practical approach for designing safety-critical controllers, but constructing them for arbitrary nonlinear dynamical systems remains a challenge. Recent efforts have explored learning-based methods,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-20 Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Pushpak Jagtap , Shishir Kolathaya

Bringing dynamic robots into the wild requires a tenuous balance between performance and safety. Yet controllers designed to provide robust safety guarantees often result in conservative behavior, and tuning these controllers to find the…