Related papers: Barrier functions enable safety-conscious force-fe…
Incorporating both flexible and rigid components in robot designs offers a unique solution to the limitations of traditional rigid robotics by enabling both compliance and strength. This paper explores the challenges and solutions for…
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…
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,…
In collaborative human-robot environments, the unpredictable and dynamic nature of human motion can lead to situations where collisions become unavoidable. In such cases, it is essential for the robotic system to proactively mitigate…
In leader-follower consensus, strong r-robustness of the communication graph provides a sufficient condition for followers to achieve consensus in the presence of misbehaving agents. Previous studies have assumed that robots can form and/or…
Safety-critical whole-body robot control demands reactive methods that ensure collision avoidance in real-time. Complementarity constraints and control barrier functions (CBF) have emerged as core tools for ensuring such safety constraints,…
Physical human-robot interaction offers the potential to leverage human intelligence and robot physical capabilities to enable a range of exciting applications, e.g., collaborative robots for rehabilitation. Safety is critical for the…
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…
Applications that require multi-robot systems to operate independently for extended periods of time in unknown or unstructured environments face a broad set of challenges, such as hardware degradation, changing weather patterns, or…
Physical human-robot collaboration requires strict safety guarantees since robots and humans work in a shared workspace. This letter presents a novel control framework to handle safety-critical position-based constraints for human-robot…
In this study, we propose a safety-critical compliant control strategy designed to strictly enforce interaction force constraints during the physical interaction of robots with unknown environments. The interaction force constraint is…
This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordinated control of cooperative robots locomoting in the presence of fixed (holonomic) constraints. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) to ensure the safe…
Set invariance techniques such as control barrier functions (CBFs) can be used to enforce time-varying constraints such as keeping a safe distance from dynamic objects. However, existing methods for enforcing time-varying constraints often…
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…
Robots operating in real world settings must navigate and maintain safety while interacting with many heterogeneous agents and obstacles. Multi-Agent Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have emerged as a computationally efficient tool to…
Construction automation increasingly requires autonomous mobile robots, yet robust autonomy remains challenging on construction sites. These environments are dynamic and often visually occluded, which complicates perception and navigation.…
With the increasing emphasis on the safe autonomy for robots, model-based safe control approaches such as Control Barrier Functions have been extensively studied to ensure guaranteed safety during inter-robot interactions. In this paper, we…
Control barrier functions (CBFs) are widely used in safety-critical controllers. However, constructing a valid CBF is challenging, especially under nonlinear or non-convex constraints and for high relative degree systems. Meanwhile, finding…
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…
This letter addresses the constraint compatibility problem of control barrier functions (CBFs), which occurs when a safety-critical CBF requires a system to apply more control effort than it is capable of generating. This inevitably leads…