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This work proposes an optimal safe controller minimizing an infinite horizon cost functional subject to control barrier functions (CBFs) safety conditions. The constrained optimal control problem is reformulated as a minimization problem of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-02-03 Hassan Almubarak , Evangelos A. Theodorou , Nader Sadegh

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

This paper proposes a constructive approach to safety control of nonlinear cascade systems subject to multiple state constraints. New design ingredients include a unified characterization of safety and stability for systematic designs of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-04 Si Wu , Tengfei Liu , Zhong-Ping Jiang

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have seen widespread success in providing forward invariance and safety guarantees for dynamical control systems. A crucial limitation of discrete-time formulations is that CBFs that are nonconcave in their…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-14 James Usevitch , Juan Augusto Paredes Salazar , Ankit Goel

We present a real-time safety filter for motion planning, including those that are learning-based, using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to provide formal guarantees for collision avoidance with road boundaries. A key feature of our…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Jianye Xu , Chang Che , Bassam Alrifaee

We develop a novel form of differentiable predictive control (DPC) with safety and robustness guarantees based on control barrier functions. DPC is an unsupervised learning-based method for obtaining approximate solutions to explicit model…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-08-05 Wenceslao Shaw Cortez , Jan Drgona , Aaron Tuor , Mahantesh Halappanavar , Draguna Vrabie

Approximate methods to solve stochastic optimal control (SOC) problems have received significant interest from researchers in the past decade. Probabilistic inference approaches to SOC have been developed to solve nonlinear quadratic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-04 Shahbaz P Qadri Syed , He Bai

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

Optimal stabilization of safety-critical nonlinear systems requires balancing long-term performance and strict safety constraints. Existing quadratic-programming-based control barrier function (CBF) safety filters are point-wise and may…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-13 Zhanglin Shangguan , Wei Xiao , Qi Li , Bo Yang , Xinping Guan

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

Deploying safety-critical controllers in practice necessitates the ability to modulate uncertainties in control systems. In this context, robust control barrier functions -- in a variety of forms -- have been used to obtain safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-22 Anil Alan , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames , Gábor Orosz

Controller synthesis, including reset controller, feedback controller, and switching logic controller, provides an essential mechanism to guarantee the correctness and reliability of hybrid systems in a correct-by-construction manner.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-13 Jiang Liu , Han Su , Yunjun Bai , Bin Gu , Bai Xue , Mengfei Yang , Naijun Zhan

This paper studies the problem of enforcing safety of a stochastic dynamical system over a finite-time horizon. We use stochastic control barrier functions as a means to quantify the probability that a system exits a given safe region of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-09-12 Cesar Santoyo , Maxence Dutreix , Samuel Coogan

Safety is of paramount importance in control systems to avoid costly risks and catastrophic damages. The control barrier function (CBF) method, a promising solution for safety-critical control, poses a new challenge of enhancing control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-26 Shengbo Wang , Ke Li , Zheng Yan , Zhenyuan Guo , Song Zhu , Guanghui Wen , Shiping Wen

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

Modern cyber-physical systems often have a two-layered design, where the primary controller is AI-enabled or an analytical controller optimising some specific cost function. If the resulting control action is perceived as unsafe, a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-16 Sunandan Adhikary , Soumyajit Dey

Certifying the safety of nonlinear systems, through the lens of set invariance and control barrier functions (CBFs), offers a powerful method for controller synthesis, provided a CBF can be constructed. This paper draws connections between…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-18 Max H. Cohen , Ryan K. Cosner , Aaron D. Ames

Safety is one of the fundamental challenges in control theory. Recently, multi-step optimal control problems for discrete-time dynamical systems were formulated to enforce stability, while subject to input constraints as well as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-14 Shuo Liu , Jun Zeng , Koushil Sreenath , Calin A. Belta

In this paper, we address the problem of synthesizing safe and stabilizing controllers for nonlinear systems subject to complex safety specifications and input constraints. We introduce the Universal Barrier Function (UBF), a single…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-04 Vrushabh Zinage , Efstathios Bakolas

Control barrier function (CBF)-based safety filters provide a systematic way to enforce state constraints, but they can significantly alter the closed-loop dynamics induced by a nominal, stabilizing controller. In particular, the resulting…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-03 Yiting Chen , Pol Mestres , Emiliano Dall'Anese , Jorge Cortés