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Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a powerful tool in the design of safety-critical controllers for nonlinear systems. In modern applications, complex systems often involve the feedback interconnection of subsystems evolving…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Stefano Di Gregorio , Guido Carnevale , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Recent advances allow for the automation of food preparation in high-throughput environments, yet the successful deployment of these robots requires the planning and execution of quick, robust, and ultimately collision-free behaviors. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Andrew Singletary , William Guffey , Tamas G. Molnar , Ryan Sinnet , Aaron D. Ames

Safety-critical control is a crucial aspect of modern systems, and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have gained popularity as the framework of choice for ensuring safety. However, implementing a CBF requires exact knowledge of the true…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-26 Rahal Nanayakkara , Aaron D. Ames , Paulo Tabuada

This paper considers the general problem of transitioning theoretically safe controllers to hardware. Concretely, we explore the application of control barrier functions (CBFs) to sampled-data systems: systems that evolve continuously but…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-14 Andrew Singletary , Yuxiao Chen , Aaron D. Ames

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

Control barrier functions (CBFs) enable guaranteed safe multi-agent navigation in the continuous domain. The resulting navigation performance, however, is highly sensitive to the underlying hyperparameters. Traditional approaches consider…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Zhan Gao , Guang Yang , Amanda Prorok

Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs) and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) can be combined, typically by means of Quadratic Programs (QPs), to design controllers that achieve performance and safety objectives. However, a significant limitation…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-18 Hugo Matias , Daniel Silvestre

Fixed-wing UAVs have transformed the transportation system with their high flight speed and long endurance, yet their safe operation in increasingly cluttered environments depends heavily on effective collision avoidance techniques. This…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-30 Aryan Agarwal , Ravi Agrawal , Manan Tayal , Pushpak Jagtap , Shishir Kolathaya

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

The increasing complexity of control systems necessitates control laws that guarantee safety w.r.t. complex combinations of constraints. In this letter, we propose a framework to describe compositional safety specifications with control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-05 Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide an effective framework for enforcing safety in dynamical systems with scalar constraints. However, many safety constraints are more naturally expressed as matrix-valued conditions, such as positive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Samuel G. Gessow , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames , Brett T. Lopez

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

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a popular tool for safety certification of nonlinear dynamical control systems. Recently, CBFs represented as neural networks have shown great promise due to their expressiveness and applicability to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Nikolaus Vertovec , Frederik Baymler Mathiesen , Thom Badings , Luca Laurenti , Alessandro Abate

We propose a novel class of risk-aware control barrier functions (RA-CBFs) for the control of stochastic safety-critical systems. Leveraging a result from the stochastic level-crossing literature, we deviate from the martingale theory that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-22 Mitchell Black , Georgios Fainekos , Bardh Hoxha , Danil Prokhorov , Dimitra Panagou

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) can provide provable safety guarantees for dynamic systems. However, finding a valid CBF for a system of interest is often non-trivial, especially for systems having low computational resources, higher-order…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Mattias Trende , Petter Ögren

Safe real-time control of robotic manipulators in unstructured environments requires handling numerous safety constraints without compromising task performance. Traditional approaches, such as artificial potential fields (APFs), suffer from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Daniel Morton , Marco Pavone

Shared autonomy blends operator intent with autonomous assistance. In cluttered environments, linear blending can produce unsafe commands even when each source is individually collision-free. Many existing approaches model obstacle…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Berk Guler , Kay Pompetzki , Yuanzheng Sun , Simon Manschitz , Jan Peters

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for safety-critical controller design for nonlinear systems. Existing design paradigms do not address the gap between theory (controller design with continuous…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-15 Andrew J. Taylor , Victor D. Dorobantu , Ryan K. Cosner , Yisong Yue , Aaron D. Ames

In this draft article, we consider the problem of achieving safe control of a dynamic system for which the safety index or (control barrier function (loosely)) has relative degree equal to two. We consider parameter affine nonlinear dynamic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-26 Jaskaran Singh Grover , Changliu Liu , Katia Sycara