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Designing controllers that accomplish tasks while guaranteeing safety constraints remains a significant challenge. We often want an agent to perform well in a nominal task, such as environment exploration, while ensuring it can avoid unsafe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-04 Azra Begzadić , Nikhil Uday Shinde , Sander Tonkens , Dylan Hirsch , Kaleb Ugalde , Michael C. Yip , Jorge Cortés , Sylvia Herbert

This tutorial paper presents recent work of the authors that extends the theory of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to address practical challenges in the synthesis of safe controllers for autonomous systems and robots. We present novel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-29 Kunal Garg , James Usevitch , Joseph Breeden , Mitchell Black , Devansh Agrawal , Hardik Parwana , Dimitra Panagou

This paper presents a novel approach for safe control synthesis using the dual formulation of the navigation problem. The main contribution of this paper is in the analytical construction of density functions for almost everywhere…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Andrew Zheng , Sriram S. K. S. Narayanan , Umesh Vaidya

This paper presents a robot control algorithm suitable for safe reactive navigation tasks in cluttered environments. The proposed approach consists of transforming the robot workspace into the \emph{ball world}, an artificial representation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Gennaro Notomista , Gary P. T. Choi , Matteo Saveriano

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to explore their environment to learn optimal behaviors and achieve maximum rewards. However, exploration can be risky when training RL directly on real systems, while simulation-based training…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Dvij Kalaria , Qin Lin , John M. Dolan

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

This paper provides an introduction and overview of recent work on control barrier functions and their use to verify and enforce safety properties in the context of (optimization based) safety-critical controllers. We survey the main…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Aaron D. Ames , Samuel Coogan , Magnus Egerstedt , Gennaro Notomista , Koushil Sreenath , Paulo Tabuada

Barrier functions (BFs) characterize safe sets of dynamical systems, where hard constraints are never violated as the system evolves over time. Computing a valid safe set and BF for a nonlinear (and potentially unmodeled), non-autonomous…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-26 Amy K. Strong , Ali Kashani , Claus Danielson , Leila Bridgeman

We provide a novel approach to synthesize controllers for nonlinear continuous dynamical systems with control against safety properties. The controllers are based on neural networks (NNs). To certify the safety property we utilize barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-22 Hengjun Zhao , Xia Zeng , Taolue Chen , Zhiming Liu , Jim Woodcock

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

Aiming to promote the wide adoption of safety filters for autonomous aerial robots, this paper presents a safe control architecture designed for seamless integration into widely used open-source autopilots. Departing from methods that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Nazar Misyats , Marvin Harms , Morten Nissov , Martin Jacquet , Kostas Alexis

Integrating learning-based techniques, especially reinforcement learning, into robotics is promising for solving complex problems in unstructured environments. However, most existing approaches are trained in well-tuned simulators and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Puze Liu , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Jan Peters , Davide Tateo

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

Ensuring safety is of paramount importance in physical human-robot interaction applications. This requires both adherence to safety constraints defined on the system state, as well as guaranteeing compliant behavior of the robot. If the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-17 Armin Lederer , Azra Begzadić , Neha Das , Sandra Hirche

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide a powerful framework for ensuring safety in dynamical systems. However, their application typically relies on full state information, which is often violated in real-world due to the availability of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-19 Vaishnavi Jagabathula , Ahan Basu , Pushpak Jagtap

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found limited success beyond simulated applications, and one main reason is the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Real world systems would realistically fail or break…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Richard Cheng , Gabor Orosz , Richard M. Murray , Joel W. Burdick

Safety is a crucial property of every robotic platform: any control policy should always comply with actuator limits and avoid collisions with the environment and humans. In reinforcement learning, safety is even more fundamental for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Puze Liu , Kuo Zhang , Davide Tateo , Snehal Jauhri , Zhiyuan Hu , Jan Peters , Georgia Chalvatzaki

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

In this paper, we propose a deep learning based control synthesis framework for fast and online computation of controllers that guarantees the safety of general nonlinear control systems with unknown dynamics in the presence of input…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-13 Vrushabh Zinage , Rohan Chandra , Efstathios Bakolas

Implementing obstacle avoidance in dynamic environments is a challenging problem for robots. Model predictive control (MPC) is a popular strategy for dealing with this type of problem, and recent work mainly uses control barrier function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Zetao Lu , Kaijun Feng , Jun Xu , Haoyao Chen , Yunjiang Lou