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Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) aim to ensure safety by constraining the control input at each time step so that the system state remains within a desired safe region. This paper presents a framework for CBFs in stochastic systems in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-20 Andrew Clark

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

We propose a control barrier function (CBF) formulation for enforcing equality and inequality constraints in variational inference. The key idea is to define a barrier functional on the space of probability density functions that encode the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Yinzhuang Yi , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be an effective tool for performing safe control synthesis for nonlinear systems. However, guaranteeing safety in the presence of disturbances and input constraints for high relative degree…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Luzia Knoedler , Oswin So , Ji Yin , Mitchell Black , Zachary Serlin , Panagiotis Tsiotras , Javier Alonso-Mora , Chuchu Fan

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) is an important tool used to address situations with multiple concurrent control objectives, such as safety and goal convergence. In this paper we investigate the similarities between CBFs and so-called…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-06 Petter Ögren

This paper studies safety guarantees for systems with time-varying control bounds. It has been shown that optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and control constraints can be reduced to a sequence of Quadratic Programs (QPs) using…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-22 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

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

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

A predictive control barrier function (PCBF) based safety filter is a modular framework to verify safety of a control input by predicting a future trajectory. The approach relies on the solution of two optimization problems, first computing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-25 Alexandre Didier , Robin C. Jacobs , Jerome Sieber , Kim P. Wabersich , Melanie N. Zeilinger

In this paper, we show that under mild controllability assumptions a time-invariant Control Barrier Function (CBF) can be constructed based on predictions with a finite horizon. As a starting point, we require only a known subset of a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-20 Adrian Wiltz , Xiao Tan , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are a practical approach for designing safety-critical controllers, but constructing them for arbitrary nonlinear dynamical systems remains a challenge. Recent efforts have explored learning-based methods,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-20 Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Pushpak Jagtap , Shishir Kolathaya

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

Robust control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a principled mechanism for smooth safety enforcement under worst-case disturbances. However, existing approaches typically rely on explicit, closed-form structure in the dynamics (e.g.,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-16 Donggeon David Oh , Duy P. Nguyen , Haimin Hu , Jaime Fernández Fisac

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

Safety has been a critical issue for the deployment of learning-based approaches in real-world applications. To address this issue, control barrier function (CBF) and its variants have attracted extensive attention for safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-08 Alaa Eddine Chriat , Chuangchuang Sun

Control Invariant (CI) sets are instrumental in certifying the safety of dynamical systems. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are effective tools to compute such sets, since the zero sublevel sets of CBFs are CI sets. However, computing CBFs…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-05 Sampath Kumar Mulagaleti , Andrea Del Prete

This paper introduces a predictive control barrier function (PCBF) framework for enforcing state constraints in discrete-time systems with unknown relative degree, which can be caused by input delays or unmodeled input dynamics. Existing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-02 Juan Augusto Paredes Salazar , James Usevitch , Ankit Goel

This paper addresses the problem of safety-critical control for non-affine control systems. It has been shown that optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and control constraints can be sub-optimally reduced to a sequence of quadratic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Wei Xiao , Ross Allen , Daniela Rus

In this paper, we study a safe control design for dynamical systems in the presence of uncertainty in a dynamical environment. The worst-case error approach is considered to formulate robust Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Vahid Hamdipoor , Nader Meskin , Christos G. Cassandras