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Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs) are popular tools for enforcing safety and stability of a controlled system, respectively. They are commonly utilized to build constraints that can be incorporated in a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-05 Fernando Castañeda , Jason J. Choi , Bike Zhang , Claire J. Tomlin , Koushil Sreenath

A common assumption on the deployment of safeguarding controllers on the digital platform is that high sampling frequency translates to a small violation of safety. This paper investigates and formalizes this assumption through the lens of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-04 Gilbert Bahati , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames

We introduce a novel approach for safe control design based on the density function. A control density function (CDF) is introduced to synthesize a safe controller for a nonlinear dynamic system. The CDF can be viewed as a dual to the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-09 Joseph Moyalan , Sriram S. K. S Narayanan , Umesh Vaidya

This paper addresses the problem of safety-critical control for systems with unknown dynamics. It has been shown that stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states while optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-31 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

The paper focuses on the design of a control strategy for safety-critical remote teleoperation. The main goal is to make the controlled system track the desired velocity specified by an operator while avoiding obstacles despite…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-21 Riccardo Periotto , Mina Ferizbegovic , Fernando S. Barbosa , Roberto C. Sundin

In safety-critical control systems, ensuring both safety and feasibility under sampled-data implementations is crucial for practical deployment. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) frameworks, such as High-Order CBFs (HOCBFs),…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-09 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

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 the safety of controllers is vital for real-world applications, but is markedly difficult when the states are not perfectly known and when the control inputs are bounded. Backup control barrier functions (bCBFs) use predictions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-23 David E. J. van Wijk , Tamas G. Molnar , Samuel Coogan , Manoranjan Majji , Aaron D. Ames , Joel W. Burdick

This paper introduces integral control barrier functions (I-CBFs) as a means to enable the safety-critical integral control of nonlinear systems. Importantly, I-CBFs allow for the holistic encoding of both state constraints and input bounds…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-09 Aaron D. Ames , Gennaro Notomista , Yorai Wardi , Magnus Egerstedt

This paper presents extensions of control barrier function (CBF) theory to systems with disturbances wherein a controller only receives measurements infrequently and operates open-loop between measurements, while still satisfying state…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-05 Joseph Breeden , Luca Zaccarian , Dimitra Panagou

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

Safe control in dynamic traffic environments remains a major challenge for autonomous vehicles (AVs), as ego vehicle and obstacle states are inherently affected by sensing noise and estimation uncertainty. However, existing studies have not…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Pei Yu Chang , Qizhe Xu , Vishnu Renganathan , Qadeer Ahmed

Complex control systems are often described in a layered fashion, represented as higher-order systems where the inputs appear after a chain of integrators. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be powerful tools for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-05 Andrew J. Taylor , Pio Ong , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions provide a powerful means for synthesizing safety filters that ensure safety framed as forward set invariance. Key to CBFs' effectiveness is the simple inequality on the system dynamics: $\dot{h} \geq - \alpha(h)$.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-18 Pio Ong , Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier function (CBF) safety filters emerged as a popular framework to certify and modify potentially unsafe control inputs, for example, provided by a reinforcement learning agent or a non-expert user. Typical CBF safety filter…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-04 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Angela P. Schoellig

Safety-critical control is imperative for deploying autonomous systems in the real world. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer strong safety guarantees when accurate system and sensor models are available. However, widely used additive,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-17 Rohan Walia , Mitchell Black , Andrew Schoer , Kevin Leahy

Control barrier functions (CBFs) play a critical role in the design of safe optimization-based controllers for control-affine systems. Given a CBF associated with a desired ``safe'' set, the typical approach consists in embedding CBF-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-12 Yiting Chen , Pol Mestres , Jorge Cortes , Emiliano Dall'Anese

This paper takes a step towards addressing the difficulty of constructing Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for parallel safety boundaries. A single CBF for both boundaries has been reported to be difficult to validate for safety, and we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Kwang Hak Kim , Mamadou Diagne , Miroslav Krstić

This paper introduces a novel safety-critical control method through the synthesis of control barrier functions (CBFs) for systems with high-relative-degree safety constraints. By extending the procedure of CBF backstepping, we propose…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2025-08-29 Laszlo Gacsi , Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar

Breaking safety constraints in control systems can lead to potential risks, resulting in unexpected costs or catastrophic damage. Nevertheless, uncertainty is ubiquitous, even among similar tasks. In this paper, we develop a novel adaptive…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-17 Shengbo Wang , Ke Li , Yin Yang , Yuting Cao , Tingwen Huang , Shiping Wen