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Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) aim to ensure safety by constraining the control input at each time step so that the system state remains within a desired safe region. This paper presents a framework for CBFs in stochastic systems in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-20 Andrew Clark

Control systems operating in the real world face countless sources of unpredictable uncertainties. These random disturbances can render deterministic guarantees inapplicable and cause catastrophic safety failures. To overcome this, this…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-10 Pol Mestres , Blake Werner , Ryan K. Cosner , Aaron D. Ames

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

We propose a novel cooperative herding strategy through backstepping control barrier functions (CBFs), which coordinates multiple herders to herd a group of evaders safely towards a designated goal region. For the herding system with…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Kang Li , Ming Li , Wenkang Ji , Zhiyong Sun , Shiyu Zhao

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool for enforcing set invariance in safety-critical control systems. While guaranteeing safety, most CBF approaches are myopic in the sense that they solve an optimization problem at…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-08-11 Max Cohen , Calin Belta

This paper proposes a safety-critical controller for dynamic and uncertain environments, leveraging a robust environment control barrier function (ECBF) to enhance the robustness against the measurement and prediction uncertainties…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-21 Ying Shuai Quan , Jian Zhou , Erik Frisk , Chung Choo Chung

Ensuring operational safety is critical for human-to-humanoid motion imitation. This paper presents a vision-based framework that enables a humanoid robot to imitate human movements while avoiding collisions. Human skeletal keypoints are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Wenqi Cai , John Abanes , Nikolaos Evangeliou , Anthony Tzes

Safety is a fundamental requirement of control systems. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are proposed to ensure the safety of the control system by constructing safety filters or synthesizing control inputs. However, the safety guarantee…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Manan Tayal , Hongchao Zhang , Pushpak Jagtap , Andrew Clark , Shishir Kolathaya

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

Ensuring safe behavior is critical for modern autonomous cyber-physical systems. Control barrier functions (CBFs) are widely used to enforce safety in autonomous systems, yet their placement within networked control architectures remains…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Severin Beger , Yuling Chen , Sandra Hirche

Human collaboration with robots requires flexible role adaptation, enabling the robot to switch between an active leader and a passive follower. Effective role switching depends on accurately estimating human intentions, which is typically…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Fan Shao , Satoshi Endo , Sandra Hirche , Fanny Ficuciello

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have a well-established theory in Euclidean spaces, yet still lack general formulations and constructive synthesis tools for systems evolving on manifolds common in robotics and aerospace applications. In…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-24 Massimiliano de Sa , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames

Robotic grasping requires safe force interaction to prevent a grasped object from being damaged or slipping out of the hand. In this vein, this paper proposes an integrated framework for grasping with formal safety guarantees based on…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Yitaek Kim , Jeeseop Kim , Albert H. Li , Aaron D. Ames , Christoffer Sloth

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have become powerful tools for ensuring safety in nonlinear systems. However, finding valid CBFs that guarantee persistent safety and feasibility remains an open challenge, especially in systems with input…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Taekyung Kim , Robin Inho Kee , Dimitra Panagou

We develop a novel adaptation-based technique for safe control design in the presence of multiple control barrier function (CBF) constraints. Specifically, we introduce an approach for synthesizing any number of candidate CBFs into one…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-20 Mitchell Black , Dimitra Panagou

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 nonlinear control theory seeks to develop feedback controllers that endow systems with properties such as safety and stability. The guarantees ensured by these controllers often rely on accurate estimates of the system state for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-02 Sarah Dean , Andrew J. Taylor , Ryan K. Cosner , Benjamin Recht , Aaron D. Ames

Robots deployed in unstructured, real-world environments operate under considerable uncertainty due to imperfect state estimates, model error, and disturbances. Given this real-world context, the goal of this paper is to develop controllers…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-27 Ryan K. Cosner , Preston Culbertson , Andrew J. Taylor , Aaron D. Ames

Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have been recently utilized in the design of provably safe feedback control laws for nonlinear systems. These feedback control methods typically compute the next control input by solving an online Quadratic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-23 Shakiba Yaghoubi , Georgios Fainekos , Sriram Sankaranarayanan