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Related papers: Learning a Better Control Barrier Function

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Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) enforce safety by rendering a prescribed safe set forward invariant. However, standard CBFs are limited to safety constraints with relative degree one, while High-Order CBF (HOCBF) methods address higher…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-22 Jianye Xu , Bassam Alrifaee

This work develops a robust adaptive control strategy for discrete-time systems using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to ensure safety under parametric model uncertainty and disturbances. A key contribution of this work is establishing a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-05 Changrui Liu , Anil Alan , Shengling Shi , Bart De Schutter

Optimal control problems with constraints ensuring safety and convergence to desired states can be mapped onto a sequence of real time optimization problems through the use of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and Control Lyapunov Functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-12-10 Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

This paper extends control barrier functions (CBFs) to high order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) that can be used for high relative degree constraints. The proposed HOCBFs are more general than recently proposed (exponential) HOCBFs. We…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-03-15 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta

Recent work showed that stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states while optimizing quadratic costs and observing state and control constraints can be reduced to quadratic programs (QP) by using control barrier functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-02-12 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a popular approach to design feedback laws that achieve safety guarantees for nonlinear systems. The CBF-based controller design relies on the availability of a model to select feasible inputs from the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-17 Lukas Lanza , Johannes Köhler , Dario Dennstädt , Thomas Berger , Karl Worthmann

Uncertainty-aware controllers that guarantee safety are critical for safety critical applications. Among such controllers, Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) based approaches are popular because they are fast, yet safe. However, most such…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Masoud Ataei , Vikas Dhiman

This paper presents a comprehensive approach for the safety-critical control of robotic manipulators operating in dynamic environments. Building upon the framework of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), we extend the collision cone…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Lucas Almeida

Ensuring safety in autonomous systems requires controllers that aim to satisfy state-wise constraints without relying on online interaction.While existing Safe Offline RL methods typically enforce soft expected-cost constraints, they…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Mumuksh Tayal , Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya , Ravi Prakash

Guaranteeing the safety of nonlinear systems with bounded inputs remains a key challenge in safe autonomy. Backup control barrier functions (bCBFs) provide a powerful mechanism for constructing controlled invariant sets by propagating…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-20 David E. J. van Wijk , Dohyun Lee , Ersin Das , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames , Joel W. Burdick

With the increasing need for safe control in the domain of autonomous driving, model-based safety-critical control approaches are widely used, especially Control Barrier Function (CBF)-based approaches. Among them, Exponential CBF (eCBF) is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Spencer Van Koevering , Yiwei Lyu , Wenhao Luo , John Dolan

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

This paper addresses learning safe output feedback control laws from partial observations of expert demonstrations. We assume that a model of the system dynamics and a state estimator are available along with corresponding error bounds,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-04 Lars Lindemann , Alexander Robey , Lejun Jiang , Satyajeet Das , Stephen Tu , Nikolai Matni

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 stands as the primary obstacle preventing the widespread adoption of learning-based robotic systems in our daily lives. While reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise as an effective robot learning paradigm, conventional RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Maeva Guerrier , Karthik Soma , Hassan Fouad , Giovanni Beltrame

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

Ensuring safety under unknown and stochastic dynamics remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose a model predictive control (MPC)-based safe RL framework, called Probabilistic Ensembles with…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-09 Ali Umut Kaypak , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

Adaptive control has focused on online control of dynamic systems in the presence of parametric uncertainties, with solutions guaranteeing stability and control performance. Safety, a related property to stability, is becoming increasingly…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-12 Johannes Autenrieb , Anuradha M. Annaswamy

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have provided a very versatile framework for the synthesis of safe control architectures for a wide class of nonlinear dynamical systems. Typically, CBF-based synthesis approaches apply to systems that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Shuo Yang , Mitchell Black , Georgios Fainekos , Bardh Hoxha , Hideki Okamoto , Rahul Mangharam