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Bipedal humanoid robots must precisely coordinate balance, timing, and contact decisions when locomoting on constrained footholds such as stepping stones, beams, and planks -- even minor errors can lead to catastrophic failure. Classical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Min Dai , William D. Compton , Junheng Li , Lizhi Yang , Aaron D. Ames

Control of legged robots is a challenging problem that has been investigated by different approaches, such as model-based control and learning algorithms. This work proposes a novel Imitating and Finetuning Model Predictive Control (IFM)…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Donghoon Youm , Hyunyoung Jung , Hyeongjun Kim , Jemin Hwangbo , Hae-Won Park , Sehoon Ha

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

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

In this paper, we present a novel probabilistic safe control framework for human-robot interaction that combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with conformal risk control to provide formal safety guarantees while considering complex…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Jake Gonzales , Kazuki Mizuta , Karen Leung , Lillian J. Ratliff

The integration of foundation models (FMs) into robotics has accelerated real-world deployment, while introducing new safety challenges arising from open-ended semantic reasoning and embodied physical action. These challenges require safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-05 Joonkyung Kim , Wenxi Chen , Davood Soleymanzadeh , Yi Ding , Xiangbo Gao , Zhengzhong Tu , Ruqi Zhang , Fan Fei , Sushant Veer , Yiwei Lyu , Minghui Zheng , Yan Gu

As legged robots take on roles in industrial and autonomous construction, collaborative loco-manipulation is crucial for handling large and heavy objects that exceed the capabilities of a single robot. However, ensuring the safety of these…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Mohsen Sombolestan , Quan Nguyen

In this paper, the issue of model uncertainty in safety-critical control is addressed with a data-driven approach. For this purpose, we utilize the structure of an input-ouput linearization controller based on a nominal model along with a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-06-05 Jason Choi , Fernando Castañeda , Claire J. Tomlin , Koushil Sreenath

Planning and control for high-dimensional robot manipulators in cluttered dynamic environments require computational efficiency and robust safety guarantees. Inspired by recent advances in learning configuration-space distance functions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Kehan Long , Ki Myung Brian Lee , Nikola Raicevic , Niyas Attasseri , Melvin Leok , Nikolay Atanasov

We present a novel method for designing higher-order Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) that guarantee convergence to a safe set within a user-specified finite. Traditional Higher Order CBFs (HOCBFs) ensure asymptotic safety but lack…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-21 Janani S K , Shishir Kolathaya

Achieving safe autonomous navigation systems is critical for deploying robots in dynamic and uncertain real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control framework leveraging neural network verification techniques to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Luca Marzari , Francesco Trotti , Enrico Marchesini , Alessandro Farinelli

This work explores a collaborative method for ensuring safety in multi-agent formation control problems. We formulate a control barrier function (CBF) based safety filter control law for a generic distributed formation controller and extend…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Brooks A. Butler , Chi Ho Leung , Philip E. Paré

In this work, we propose a novel motion planning algorithm to facilitate safety-critical navigation for autonomous mobile robots. The proposed algorithm integrates a real-time dynamic obstacle tracking and mapping system that categorizes…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Faduo Liang , Yunfeng Yang , Shi-Lu Dai

Control barrier functions guarantee safety but typically require accurate system models. Parametric uncertainty invalidates these guarantees. Existing robust methods maintain safety via worst-case bounds, limiting performance, while modular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-27 Mohammadreza Kamaldar

With the increasing need for safe control in the domain of autonomous driving, model-based safety-critical control approaches are widely used, especially Control Barrier Function (CBF)-based approaches. Among them, Exponential CBF (eCBF) is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Spencer Van Koevering , Yiwei Lyu , Wenhao Luo , John Dolan

Autonomous navigation in complex, non-convex environments remains challenging when robot dynamics, control limits, and exact robot geometry must all be taken into account. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical planning and control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Yi-Hsuan Chen , Salman Ghori , Ania Adil , Eric Feron , Calin Belta

With the increasing emphasis on the safe autonomy for robots, model-based safe control approaches such as Control Barrier Functions have been extensively studied to ensure guaranteed safety during inter-robot interactions. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Yiwei Lyu , Wenhao Luo , John M. Dolan

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in legged locomotion over various challenging environments. However, due to the sim-to-real gap and lack of explainability, unconstrained RL policies deployed in the real…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Haoyu Wang , Ruyi Zhou , Liang Ding , Tie Liu , Zhelin Zhang , Peng Xu , Haibo Gao , Zongquan Deng

This paper addresses the problem of guaranteeing safety of multiple coordinated agents moving in dynamic environments. It has recently been shown that this problem can be efficiently solved through the notion of Control Barrier Functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-11 Aurora Haraldsen , Josef Matous , Kristin Y. Pettersen

This article propose a whole-body impedance coordinative control framework for a wheel-legged humanoid robot to achieve adaptability on complex terrains while maintaining robot upper body stability. The framework contains a bi-level control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Lei Shi , Xinghua Yu , Cheng Zhou , Wanxin Jin , Wanchao Chi , Shenghao Zhang , Dongsheng Zhang , Xiong Li , Zhengyou Zhang