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Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to endow systems with properties of stability and safety, and have been deployed successfully in multiple domains. Despite this success, model uncertainty remains a significant challenge in synthesizing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-12-24 Andrew Taylor , Andrew Singletary , Yisong Yue , Aaron Ames

We propose new methods to synthesize control barrier function (CBF)-based safe controllers that avoid input saturation, which can cause safety violations. In particular, our method is created for high-dimensional, general nonlinear systems,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Simin Liu , Changliu Liu , John Dolan

Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…

This work presents a unified approach for collision avoidance using Collision-Cone Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in both ground (UGV) and aerial (UAV) unmanned vehicles. We propose a novel CBF formulation inspired by collision cones, to…

For efficient and robust task accomplishment in multi-agent systems, an agent must be able to distinguish cooperative agents from non-cooperative agents, i.e., uncooperative and adversarial agents. Task descriptions capturing safety and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-12 Hardik Parwana , Dimitra Panagou

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

In the context of safety-critical control, we propose and analyse the use of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to limit the kinetic energy of torque-controlled robots. The proposed scheme is able to modify a nominal control action in a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Federico Califano , Daniel Logmans , Wesley Roozing

Control barrier functions (CBF) have become popular as a safety filter to guarantee the safety of nonlinear dynamical systems for arbitrary inputs. However, it is difficult to construct functions that satisfy the CBF constraints for high…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-06 Oswin So , Zachary Serlin , Makai Mann , Jake Gonzales , Kwesi Rutledge , Nicholas Roy , Chuchu Fan

State and input constraints are ubiquitous in control system design. One recently developed tool to deal with these constraints is control barrier functions (CBF) which transform state constraints into conditions in the input space.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-07 Xiao Tan , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

This paper presents a formal framework for collision avoidance in multi-robot systems, wherein an existing controller is modified in a minimally invasive fashion to ensure safety. We build this framework through the use of control barrier…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-05 Li Wang , Aaron Ames , Magnus Egerstedt

Ensuring safety in real-world robotic systems is often challenging due to unmodeled disturbances and noisy sensor measurements. To account for such stochastic uncertainties, many robotic systems leverage probabilistic state estimators such…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Matti Vahs , Christian Pek , Jana Tumova

Safe control in unknown environments is a significant challenge in robotics. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are widely used to guarantee system safety, they often assume known environments with predefined obstacles. The proposed…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Golnaz Raja , Teemu Mökkönen , Reza Ghabcheloo

Until recently, the concept of soft robot safety was an informal notion, often attributed solely to the fact that soft robots are less likely to damage their operating environment than rigid robots. As the field moves toward feedback…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Nicholas Pagliocca , Behrad Koohbor , Mitja Trkov

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide an elegant framework for constraining nonlinear control system dynamics to remain within an invariant subset of a designated safe set. However, identifying a CBF that balances performance-by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Lakshmideepakreddy Manda , Shaoru Chen , Mahyar Fazlyab

In this paper, we introduce a class of future-focused control barrier functions (ff-CBF) aimed at improving traditionally myopic CBF based control design and study their efficacy in the context of an unsignaled four-way intersection…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-05 Mitchell Black , Mrdjan Jankovic , Abhishek Sharma , Dimitra Panagou

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

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

Safety has been of paramount importance in motion planning and control techniques and is an active area of research in the past few years. Most safety research for mobile robots target at maintaining safety with the notion of collision…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Manas Gupta , Xuesu Xiao

This paper proposes a safety-critical control design approach for nonlinear control affine systems in the presence of matched and unmatched uncertainties. Our constructive framework couples control barrier function (CBF) theory with a new…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-03 Ersin Das , Joel W. Burdick

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