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This paper studies the design of controllers that guarantee stability and safety of nonlinear control affine systems with parametric uncertainty in both the drift and control vector fields. To this end, we introduce novel classes of robust…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-12 Max H. Cohen , Calin Belta , Roberto Tron

Guaranteeing safety for robotic and autonomous systems in real-world environments is a challenging task that requires the mitigation of stochastic uncertainties. Control barrier functions have, in recent years, been widely used for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-31 Andrew Singletary , Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Aaron D. Ames

This paper presents a control design method that achieves safety for systems with unmodeled dynamics at the plant input. The proposed method combines control barrier functions (CBFs) and integral quadratic constraints (IQCs). Simplified,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-05 Peter Seiler , Mrdjan Jankovic , Erik Hellstrom

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

Control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) and control barrier functions (CBFs) have been used to develop provably safe controllers by means of quadratic programs (QPs), guaranteeing safety in the form of trajectory invariance with respect to a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-21 Matheus F. Reis , A. Pedro Aguiar , Paulo Tabuada

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

Control systems operating in the real world face countless sources of unpredictable uncertainties. These random disturbances can render deterministic guarantees inapplicable and cause catastrophic safety failures. To overcome this, this…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-10 Pol Mestres , Blake Werner , Ryan K. Cosner , Aaron D. Ames

Ensuring the safety of dynamical systems is crucial, where collision avoidance is a primary concern. Recently, control barrier functions (CBFs) have emerged as an effective method to integrate safety constraints into control synthesis…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-21 Shiqing Wei , Rooholla Khorrambakht , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Vinicius Mariano Gonçalves , Farshad Khorrami

Safety assurance is critical in the planning and control of robotic systems. For robots operating in the real world, the safety-critical design often needs to explicitly address uncertainties and the pre-computed guarantees often rely on…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Hao Zhou , Yanze Zhang , Wenhao Luo

Ensuring safe exploration in high-dimensional systems with unknown dynamics remains a significant challenge. Existing safe reinforcement learning methods often provide safety guarantees only in expectation, which can still lead to safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rahul Narava , Siddharth Verma , Ojas Jain , Shashi Shekhar Jha , Mayank Shekhar Jha

This letter studies the dynamical properties of safety filters designed based on Control Barrier Functions (CBF). This mechanism, which is popular in safety-critical applications, takes a nominal controller and minimally modifies it to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Pol Mestres , Shima Sadat Mousavi , Aaron D. Ames

This paper addresses the challenge of integrating explicit hard constraints into the control barrier function (CBF) framework for ensuring safety in autonomous systems, including robots. We propose a novel data-driven method to derive CBFs…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Jaemin Lee , Jeeseop Kim , Aaron D. Ames

Safety is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. Recently, one-step or multi-step optimal control problems for discrete-time nonlinear dynamical system were formulated to offer tracking stability using control Lyapunov functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-04 Jun Zeng , Zhongyu Li , Koushil Sreenath

Control barrier functions (CBFs) offer an efficient framework for designing real-time safe controllers. However, CBF-based controllers can be short-sighted, resulting in poor performance, a behaviour which is aggravated in uncertain…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-16 Allan Andre do Nascimento , Antonis Papachristodoulou , Kostas Margellos

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

We address the problem of controlling Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) in conflict areas of a traffic network subject to hard safety constraints. It has been shown that such problems can be solved through a combination of tractable…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-24 Ehsan Sabouni , Christos G. Cassandras , Wei Xiao , Nader Meskin

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) enforce safety by rendering a prescribed safe set forward invariant. However, standard CBFs are limited to safety constraints with relative degree one, while High-Order CBF (HOCBF) methods address higher…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-22 Jianye Xu , Bassam Alrifaee

Learning-based control with safety guarantees usually requires real-time safety certification and modifications of possibly unsafe learning-based policies. The control barrier function (CBF) method uses a safety filter containing a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-25 Kanghui He , Shengling Shi , Ton van den Boom , Bart De Schutter

We present a novel technique for solving the problem of safe control for a general class of nonlinear, control-affine systems subject to parametric model uncertainty. Invoking Lyapunov analysis and the notion of fixed-time stability (FxTS),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-26 Mitchell Black , Ehsan Arabi , Dimitra Panagou

In this paper, a safety-critical control strategy for a nonholonomic robot is developed to generate control signals that result in optimal, obstacle-free paths through dynamic environments. We formulate the control synthesis problem as an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-04 Nhat Nguyen Minh , Stephen McIlvanna , Yuzhu Sun , Yan Jin , Mien Van