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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in control tasks but faces significant challenges in real-world applications, primarily due to the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Existing methods often struggle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Donghe Chen , Han Wang , Lin Cheng , Shengping Gong

Input delays affect systems such as teleoperation and wirelessly autonomous connected vehicles, and may lead to safety violations. One promising way to ensure safety in the presence of delay is to employ control barrier functions (CBFs),…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-20 Yitaek Kim , Ersin Das , Jeeseop Kim , Aaron D. Ames , Joel W. Burdick , Christoffer Sloth

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for safety-critical controller design for nonlinear systems. Existing design paradigms do not address the gap between theory (controller design with continuous…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-15 Andrew J. Taylor , Victor D. Dorobantu , Ryan K. Cosner , Yisong Yue , Aaron D. Ames

Recent work showed that stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states while optimizing quadratic costs and observing state and control constraints can be reduced to quadratic programs (QP) by using control barrier functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-02-12 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

We propose a design method for a robust safety filter based on Input Constrained Control Barrier Functions (ICCBF) for car-like robots moving in complex environments. A robust ICCBF that can be efficiently implemented is obtained by…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Sven Brüggemann , Dominic Nightingale , Jack Silberman , Maurício de Oliveira

Robots deployed in unstructured, real-world environments operate under considerable uncertainty due to imperfect state estimates, model error, and disturbances. Given this real-world context, the goal of this paper is to develop controllers…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-27 Ryan K. Cosner , Preston Culbertson , Andrew J. Taylor , Aaron D. Ames

Multi-objective safety-critical control entails a diligent design to avoid possibly conflicting scenarios and ensure safety. This paper addresses multi-objective safety-critical control through a novel approach utilizing barrier states…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-08 Hassan Almubarak , Nader Sadegh , Evangelos A. Theodorou

In emerging control applications involving multiple and complex tasks, safety filters are gaining prominence as a modular approach to enforcing safety constraints. Among various methods, control barrier functions (CBFs) are widely used for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-12 Jason J. Choi , Claire J. Tomlin , Shankar Sastry , Koushil Sreenath

We propose a novel class of risk-aware control barrier functions (RA-CBFs) for the control of stochastic safety-critical systems. Leveraging a result from the stochastic level-crossing literature, we deviate from the martingale theory that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-22 Mitchell Black , Georgios Fainekos , Bardh Hoxha , Danil Prokhorov , Dimitra Panagou

This paper introduces differentiable higher-order control barrier functions (CBF) that are end-to-end trainable together with learning systems. CBFs are usually overly conservative, while guaranteeing safety. Here, we address their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Wei Xiao , Ramin Hasani , Xiao Li , Daniela Rus

Guaranteeing safety of perception-based learning systems is challenging due to the absence of ground-truth state information unlike in state-aware control scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a safety guaranteed learning framework for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Wei Xiao , Tsun-Hsuan Wang , Makram Chahine , Alexander Amini , Ramin Hasani , Daniela Rus

Optimal control methods provide solutions to safety-critical problems but easily become intractable. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a popular technique that facilitates their solution by provably guaranteeing safety,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-21 Ehsan Sabouni , H. M. Sabbir Ahmad , Vittorio Giammarino , Christos G. Cassandras , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Wenchao Li

State estimation uncertainty is prevalent in real-world applications, hindering the application of safety-critical control. Existing methods address this by strengthening a Control Barrier Function (CBF) condition either to handle actuation…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-31 Xiao Tan , Rahal Nanayakkara , Paulo Tabuada , Aaron D. Ames

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs) are popular tools for enforcing safety and stability of a controlled system, respectively. They are commonly utilized to build constraints that can be incorporated in a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-05 Fernando Castañeda , Jason J. Choi , Bike Zhang , Claire J. Tomlin , Koushil Sreenath

In this paper, we define and analyze a subclass of (time-invariant) Control Barrier Functions (CBF) that have favorable properties for the construction of uniformly timevarying CBFs and thereby for the satisfaction of uniformly time-varying…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-26 Adrian Wiltz , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

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

This paper investigates the control barrier function (CBF) based safety-critical control for continuous nonlinear control affine systems using the more efficient online algorithms through time-varying optimization. The idea lies in that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-21 Shengbo Wang , Shiping Wen , Yin Yang , Yuting Cao , Kaibo Shi , Tingwen Huang

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 addresses the challenge of ensuring safety in stochastic control systems with high-relative-degree constraints, while maintaining feasibility and mitigating conservatism in risk evaluation. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-08 Shuo Liu , Calin A. Belta

This paper addresses a distributed leader-follower formation control problem for a group of agents, each using a body-fixed camera with a limited field of view (FOV) for state estimation. The main challenge arises from the need to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-18 Richie R. Suganda , Tony Tran , Miao Pan , Lei Fan , Qin Lin , Bin Hu