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Safety is a fundamental requirement for autonomous systems operating in critical domains. Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been used to design safety filters that minimally alter nominal controls for such systems to maintain their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yuxuan Yang , Hussein Sibai

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

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-28 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Shimin Wang , Wei Xiao , Martin Guay

This paper investigates the safety analysis and verification of nonlinear systems subject to high-relative-degree constraints and unknown disturbance. The closed-form solution of the high-order control barrier functions (HOCBF) optimization…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-11 Yan Wei , Yu Feng , Linlin Ou , Yueying Wang , Xinyi Yu

We propose a novel (Type-II) zeroing control barrier function (ZCBF) for safety-critical control, which generalizes the original ZCBF approach. Our method allows for applications to a larger class of systems (e.g. passivity-based) while…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Wenceslao Shaw Cortez , Xiao Tan , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have recently introduced a systematic tool to ensure system safety by establishing set invariance. When combined with a nominal control strategy, they form a safety-critical control mechanism. However, the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-22 Mohammad Aali , Jun Liu

In this paper, we propose a notion of high-order (zeroing) barrier functions that generalizes the concept of zeroing barrier functions and guarantees set forward invariance by checking their higher order derivatives. The proposed…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-07-02 Xiao Tan , Wenceslao Shaw Cortez , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

We study safety-critical control on fully actuated mechanical systems by means of Zeroing Control Barrier Functions (ZCBFs) defined on Lie Groups. Specifically, we introduce and theoretically validate two classes of ZCBFs. The first…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-09 Alessandro Letti , Riccardo Zanella , Alessandro Macchelli , Federico Califano

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 a critical property for control systems in medicine, transportation, manufacturing, and other applications, and can be defined as ensuring positive invariance of a predefined safe set. This paper investigates the problems of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-12 Andrew Clark

Safety critical systems involve the tight coupling between potentially conflicting control objectives and safety constraints. As a means of creating a formal framework for controlling systems of this form, and with a view toward automotive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-27 Aaron D. Ames , Xiangru Xu , Jessy W. Grizzle , Paulo Tabuada

Providing safety guarantees for learning-based controllers is important for real-world applications. One approach to realizing safety for arbitrary control policies is safety filtering. If necessary, the filter modifies control inputs to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-18 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Mingxuan Che , Angela P. Schoellig

In this paper, we propose a novel Control Barrier Function (CBF) based controller for nonlinear systems with complex, time-varying input constraints. To deal with these constraints, we introduce an auxiliary control input to transform the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-20 Yaosheng Deng , Yang Bai , Yujie Wang , Masaki Ogura , Mir Feroskhan

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

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a powerful tool for the constrained control of nonlinear systems; however, the majority of results in the literature focus on systems subject to a single CBF constraint, making it challenging to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-05 Max H. Cohen , Eugene Lavretsky , Aaron D. Ames

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

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

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a powerful tool for synthesizing safe control actions; however, constructing CBFs remains difficult for general nonlinear systems. In this work, we provide a constructive framework for synthesizing CBFs…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-04 Gilbert Bahati , Ryan K. Cosner , Max H. Cohen , Ryan M. Bena , Aaron D. Ames

Verifying the safety of controllers is critical for many applications, but is especially challenging for systems with bounded inputs. Backup control barrier functions (bCBFs) offer a structured approach to synthesizing safe controllers that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-08 David E. J. van Wijk , Ersin Das , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames , Joel W. Burdick

This letter presents a new notion of input-to-state safe control barrier functions (ISSf-CBFs), which ensure safety of nonlinear dynamical systems under input disturbances. Similar to how safety conditions are specified in terms of forward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-14 Shishir Kolathaya , Aaron D. Ames