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Related papers: Learning a Better Control Barrier Function

200 papers

This work addresses the challenge of safe and efficient mobile robot navigation in complex dynamic environments with concave moving obstacles. Reactive safe controllers like Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) design obstacle avoidance…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Yifan Xue , Ze Zhang , Knut Åkesson , Nadia Figueroa

Safety-critical applications require controllers/policies that can guarantee safety with high confidence. The control barrier function is a useful tool to guarantee safety if we have access to the ground-truth system dynamics. In practice,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Athindran Ramesh Kumar , Sulin Liu , Jaime F. Fisac , Ryan P. Adams , Peter J. Ramadge

Control barrier functions have shown great success in addressing control problems with safety guarantees. These methods usually find the next safe control input by solving an online quadratic programming problem. However, model uncertainty…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-24 Chuanzheng Wang , Yinan Li , Yiming Meng , Stephen L. Smith , Jun Liu

Ensuring both performance and safety is critical for autonomous systems operating in real-world environments. While safety filters such as Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) enforce constraints by modifying nominal controllers in real time,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-21 Aditya Singh , Aastha Mishra , Manan Tayal , Shishir Kolathaya , Pushpak Jagtap

This paper presents a new approach for guaranteed safety subject to input constraints (e.g., actuator limits) using a composition of multiple control barrier functions (CBFs). First, we present a method for constructing a single CBF from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-10 Pedram Rabiee , Jesse B. Hoagg

We propose a learning-based Control Barrier Function (CBF) to reduce conservatism in collision avoidance for car-like robots. Traditional CBFs often use the Euclidean distance between robots' centers as a safety margin, which neglects their…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Jianye Xu , Bassam Alrifaee

This paper studies the efficient implementation of safety filters that are designed using control barrier functions (CBFs), which minimally modify a nominal controller to render it safe with respect to a prescribed set of states. Although…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-23 Pol Mestres , Shima Sadat Mousavi , Pio Ong , Lizhi Yang , Ersin Das , Joel W. Burdick , Aaron D. Ames

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

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

In this work, we consider the problem of designing a safety filter for a nonlinear uncertain control system. Our goal is to augment an arbitrary controller with a safety filter such that the overall closed-loop system is guaranteed to stay…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Angela P. Schoellig

The optimal performance of robotic systems is usually achieved near the limit of state and input bounds. Model predictive control (MPC) is a prevalent strategy to handle these operational constraints, however, safety still remains an open…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-24 Jun Zeng , Bike Zhang , Koushil Sreenath

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

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

This paper considers the safety-critical control design problem with output measurements. An observer-based safety control framework that integrates the estimation error quantified observer and the control barrier function (CBF) approach is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-24 Yujie Wang , Xiangru Xu

To navigate complex environments, robots must increasingly use high-dimensional visual feedback (e.g. images) for control. However, relying on high-dimensional image data to make control decisions raises important questions; particularly,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Mukun Tong , Charles Dawson , Chuchu Fan

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

As autonomous systems become increasingly prevalent in daily life, ensuring their safety is paramount. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as an effective tool for guaranteeing safety; however, manually designing them for specific…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Shreenabh Agrawal , Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya

Control barrier functions (CBFs) offer a powerful tool for enforcing safety specifications in control synthesis. This paper deals with the problem of constructing valid CBFs. Given a second-order system and any desired safety set with…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-17 Mohammed Alyaseen , Nikolay Atanasov , Jorge Cortes

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are an effective model-based tool to formally certify the safety of a system. With the growing complexity of modern control problems, CBFs have received increasing attention in both optimization-based and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Lishuo Pan , Mattia Catellani , Thales C. Silva , Lorenzo Sabattini , Nora Ayanian

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