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Adaptive Control Lyapunov Functions (aCLFs) were introduced 20 years ago, and provided a Lyapunov-based methodology for stabilizing systems with parameter uncertainty. The goal of this paper is to revisit this classic formulation in the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-20 Andrew J. Taylor , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been demonstrated as an effective method for safety-critical control of autonomous systems. Although CBFs are simple to deploy, their design remains challenging, motivating the development of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Bojan Derajić , Sebastian Bernhard , Wolfgang Hönig

Safety is always one of the most critical principles for a system to be controlled. This paper investigates a safety-critical control scheme for unknown structured systems by using the control barrier function (CBF) method. Benefited from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-17 Shengbo Wang , Bo Lyu , Shiping Wen , Kaibo Shi , Song Zhu , Tingwen Huang

As autonomous systems become increasingly prevalent in daily life, ensuring their safety is paramount. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as an effective tool for guaranteeing safety; however, manually designing them for specific…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Shreenabh Agrawal , Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya

The control barrier function (CBF) has become a fundamental tool in safety-critical systems design since its invention. Typically, the quadratic optimization framework is employed to accommodate CBFs, control Lyapunov functions (CLFs),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Junjun Xie , Liang Hu , Jiahu Qin , Jun Yang , Huijun Gao

Ensuring safety in autonomous systems requires controllers that aim to satisfy state-wise constraints without relying on online interaction.While existing Safe Offline RL methods typically enforce soft expected-cost constraints, they…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Mumuksh Tayal , Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya , Ravi Prakash

Ensuring safety under unknown and stochastic dynamics remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose a model predictive control (MPC)-based safe RL framework, called Probabilistic Ensembles with…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-09 Ali Umut Kaypak , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng

Safety-critical control is imperative for deploying autonomous systems in the real world. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer strong safety guarantees when accurate system and sensor models are available. However, widely used additive,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-17 Rohan Walia , Mitchell Black , Andrew Schoer , Kevin Leahy

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have recently introduced a systematic tool to ensure system safety by establishing set invariance. When combined with a nominal control strategy, they form a safety-critical control mechanism. However, the…

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

Useful robot control algorithms should not only achieve performance objectives but also adhere to hard safety constraints. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have been developed to provably ensure system safety through forward invariance.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Matti Vahs , Rafael I. Cabral Muchacho , Florian T. Pokorny , Jana Tumova

Providing safety guarantees for stochastic dynamical systems is a central problem in various fields, including control theory, machine learning, and robotics. Existing methods either employ Stochastic Barrier Functions (SBFs) or rely on…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-27 Luca Laurenti , Morteza Lahijanian

Abrupt maneuvers by surrounding vehicles (SVs) can typically lead to safety concerns and affect the task efficiency of the ego vehicle (EV), especially with model uncertainties stemming from environmental disturbances. This paper presents a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Lei Zheng , Rui Yang , Zengqi Peng , Wei Yan , Michael Yu Wang , Jun Ma

Time delays in feedback control loops can cause controllers to respond too late, and with excessively large corrective actions, leading to unsafe behavior (violation of state constraints) and controller infeasibility (violation of input…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-26 Adam K. Kiss , Ersin Das , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

Safe navigation for an ego vehicle in uncertain environments characterized by dynamic obstacles with unknown nonlinear dynamics is a challenging problem of significant practical interest. Existing approaches in the literature either lack…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-17 Jiwon Lee , Hugo Matias , Daniel Silvestre , Thinh T. Doan

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are an effective model-based tool to formally certify the safety of a system. With the growing complexity of modern control problems, CBFs have received increasing attention in both optimization-based and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Lishuo Pan , Mattia Catellani , Thales C. Silva , Lorenzo Sabattini , Nora Ayanian

This paper studies the problem of finite-time convergence to a prescribed safe set for nonlinear systems whose initial states violate the safety constraints. Existing Control Lyapunov-Barrier Functions (CLBFs) can enforce recovery to the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-27 Anni Li , Yingqing Chen , Christos G. Cassandras , Wei Xiao

Safety-critical control systems, such as spacecraft performing proximity operations, must provide formal safety guarantees despite stochastic uncertainties from state estimation and unmodeled dynamics. Although Control Barrier Functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-13 Kazuya Echigo , David E. J. van Wijk , Pol Mestres , Ersin Daş , Joel W. Burdick , Aaron D. Ames

This paper develops a model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) framework for learning online the value function of an infinite-horizon optimal control problem while obeying safety constraints expressed as control barrier functions (CBFs).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Max H. Cohen , Calin Belta