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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

Trajectory optimization under uncertainties is a challenging problem for robots in contact with the environment. Such uncertainties are inevitable due to estimation errors, control imperfections, and model mismatches between planning models…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Ahmad Gazar , Majid Khadiv , Andrea Del Prete , Ludovic Righetti

This paper presents a new control barrier function (CBF) designed to improve the efficiency of collision avoidance for nonholonomic vehicles. Traditional CBFs typically rely on the shortest Euclidean distance to obstacles, overlooking the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Changyu Lee , Kiyong Park , Jinwhan Kim

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Patanjali Maithani , Aliasghar Arab , Farshad Khorrami , Prashanth Krishnamurthy

Safety remains a central challenge in control of dynamical systems, particularly when the boundaries of unsafe sets are complex (e.g., nonconvex, nonsmooth) or unknown. This paper proposes a learning-enabled framework for safety-critical…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-16 Shuo Liu , Zhe Huang , Jun Zeng , Koushil Sreenath , Calin A. Belta

Ensuring safe and effective collaboration between humans and autonomous legged robots is a fundamental challenge in shared autonomy, particularly for teleoperated systems navigating cluttered environments. Conventional shared-control…

The safety-critical control of robotic systems often must account for multiple, potentially conflicting, safety constraints. This paper proposes novel relaxation techniques to address safety-critical control problems in the presence of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Jaemin Lee , Jeeseop Kim , Aaron D. Ames

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

In safety-critical control, managing safety constraints with high relative degrees and uncertain obstacle dynamics pose significant challenges in guaranteeing safety performance. Robust Control Barrier Functions (RCBFs) offer a potential…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-06 Kwang Hak Kim , Mamadou Diagne , Miroslav Krstić

Obstacle avoidance of polytopic obstacles by polytopic robots is a challenging problem in optimization-based control and trajectory planning. Many existing methods rely on smooth geometric approximations, such as hyperspheres or ellipsoids,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Shuo Liu , Zhe Huang , Calin A. Belta

Safe autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains a critical challenge for robots with limited sensing capabilities. While safety-critical control techniques, such as Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), have been proposed to ensure…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Taekyung Kim , Dimitra Panagou

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

This article proposes a Novel Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) for navigation and obstacle avoidance of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The proposed NMPC formulation allows for a fully parametric obstacle trajectory, while in…

In the field of control engineering, the connection between Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and time-varying Control Barrier Functions (CBF) has attracted considerable attention. CBFs have demonstrated notable success in ensuring the safety of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Andrea Ruo , Lorenzo Sabattini , Valeria Villani

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-28 Logan E. Beaver

Safety is of paramount importance in control systems to avoid costly risks and catastrophic damages. The control barrier function (CBF) method, a promising solution for safety-critical control, poses a new challenge of enhancing control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-26 Shengbo Wang , Ke Li , Zheng Yan , Zhenyuan Guo , Song Zhu , Guanghui Wen , Shiping Wen

Navigating a collision-free and optimal trajectory for a robot is a challenging task, particularly in environments with moving obstacles such as humans. We formulate this problem as a stochastic optimal control problem. Since solving the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Seyyed Reza Jafari , Anders Hansson , Bo Wahlberg

This paper introduces a neural Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) framework for mapless, collision-free navigation in unknown environments with Aerial Robots, using onboard range sensing. We leverage deep neural networks to encode a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Martin Jacquet , Marvin Harms , Kostas Alexis

Control barrier functions (CBFs) offer an efficient framework for designing real-time safe controllers. However, CBF-based controllers can be short-sighted, resulting in poor performance, a behaviour which is aggravated in uncertain…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-16 Allan Andre do Nascimento , Antonis Papachristodoulou , Kostas Margellos

We present a closed-form optimal control that satisfies both safety constraints (i.e., state constraints) and input constraints (e.g., actuator limits) using a composition of multiple control barrier functions (CBFs). This main contribution…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-08 Pedram Rabiee , Jesse B. Hoagg