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Guaranteeing safety in the presence of unmatched disturbances -- uncertainties that cannot be directly canceled by the control input -- remains a key challenge in nonlinear control. This paper presents a constructive approach to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-04 Max H. Cohen , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames

This tutorial provides a critical review of the practical application of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in robotic safety. While the theoretical foundations of CBFs are well-established, I identify a recurring gap between the mathematical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Taekyung Kim

Ensuring the safety of complex dynamical systems often relies on Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability Analysis or Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Both methods require computing a function that characterizes a safe set that can be made…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Jixian Liu , Enrique Mallada

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 study feasibility guarantees for safety filters developed using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) when a safe set is defined using the pointwise minimum of continuously differentiable functions, a construction that is common for the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-13 Anil Alan , Bart De Schutter

This paper studies safety and feasibility guarantees for systems with tight control bounds. It has been shown that stabilizing an affine control system while optimizing a quadratic cost and satisfying state and control constraints can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-10 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

The problem of safely learning and controlling a dynamical system - i.e., of stabilizing an originally (partially) unknown system while ensuring that it does not leave a prescribed 'safe set' - has recently received tremendous attention in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-10 Jafar Abbaszadeh Chekan , Cedric Langbort

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are widely used in safety-critical controllers. However, constructing a valid CBF is challenging, especially under nonlinear or non-convex constraints and for high relative degree systems. Meanwhile, finding…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-10-12 Bolun Dai , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

We present a novel technique for online safety verification of autonomous systems, which performs reachability analysis efficiently for both bounded and unbounded horizons by employing neural barrier certificates. Our approach uses barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-30 Alessandro Abate , Sergiy Bogomolov , Alec Edwards , Kostiantyn Potomkin , Sadegh Soudjani , Paolo Zuliani

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

Optimal control for safety-critical systems is often dependent on the conservativeness of constraints. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) serve as a medium to represent such constraints, but constructing a minimally conservative CBF is a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-08 Tanmay Dokania , Yashwanth Kumar Nakka

Safety filters constructed from control barrier functions (CBFs) are commonly appended to pre-trained neural network controllers to enforce safety requirements. However, this decoupled design with hand-tuned, fixed CBF parameters often…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-27 Yang Zhao , Jungeun Lee , Jeong hwan Jeon , Sze Zheng Yong

We propose new methods to synthesize control barrier function (CBF)-based safe controllers that avoid input saturation, which can cause safety violations. In particular, our method is created for high-dimensional, general nonlinear systems,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Simin Liu , Changliu Liu , John Dolan

This work develops a robust adaptive control strategy for discrete-time systems using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to ensure safety under parametric model uncertainty and disturbances. A key contribution of this work is establishing a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-05 Changrui Liu , Anil Alan , Shengling Shi , Bart De Schutter

A runtime assurance system (RTA) for a given plant enables the exercise of an untrusted or experimental controller while assuring safety with a backup (or safety) controller. The relevant computational design problem is to create a logic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-09 Kristina Miller , Christopher K. Zeitler , William Shen , Kerianne Hobbs , Sayan Mitra , John Schierman , Mahesh Viswanathan

Safety filters based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide formal guarantees of forward invariance, but are often difficult to implement in networked dynamical systems. This is due to global coupling and communication requirements.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-07 Emiliano Dall'Anese

Measurements and state estimates are often imperfect in control practice, posing challenges for safety-critical applications, where safety guarantees rely on accurate state information. In the presence of estimation errors, several prior…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-21 Ersin Das , Rahal Nanayakkara , Xiao Tan , Ryan M. Bena , Joel W. Burdick , Paulo Tabuada , Aaron D. Ames

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-02 Vrushabh Zinage , Rohan Chandra , Efstathios Bakolas

Ensuring both performance and safety is critical for autonomous systems operating in real-world environments. While safety filters such as Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) enforce constraints by modifying nominal controllers in real time,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-21 Aditya Singh , Aastha Mishra , Manan Tayal , Shishir Kolathaya , Pushpak Jagtap

Constructing a control invariant set with an appropriate shape that fits within a given state constraint is a fundamental problem in safety-critical control but is known to be difficult, especially for large or complex spaces. This paper…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-18 Inkyu Jang , H. Jin Kim