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Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found limited success beyond simulated applications, and one main reason is the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Real world systems would realistically fail or break…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Richard Cheng , Gabor Orosz , Richard M. Murray , Joel W. Burdick

With the increasing complexity of real-world systems and varying environmental uncertainties, it is difficult to build an accurate dynamic model, which poses challenges especially for safety-critical control. In this paper, a learning-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-13 Sihua Zhang , Di-Hua Zhai , Xiaobing Dai , Tzu-yuan Huang , Yuanqing Xia , Sandra Hirche

This paper presents a hybrid control framework with a risk-budgeted monitor for safety-certified autonomous driving. A sliding-window monitor tracks insufficient barrier residuals and triggers switching from a relaxed control barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Pei Yu Chang , Vishnu Renganathan , Qadeer Ahmed

Safety is a fundamental requirement of many robotic systems. Control barrier function (CBF)-based approaches have been proposed to guarantee the safety of robotic systems. However, the effectiveness of these approaches highly relies on the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Hongchao Zhang , Luyao Niu , Andrew Clark , Radha Poovendran

Modern autonomous systems, such as flying, legged, and wheeled robots, are generally characterized by high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics, which presents challenges for model-based safety-critical control design. Motivated by the success of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-21 Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

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

The increasing complexity of modern robotic systems and the environments they operate in necessitates the formal consideration of safety in the presence of imperfect measurements. In this paper we propose a rigorous framework for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-30 Ryan K. Cosner , Andrew W. Singletary , Andrew J. Taylor , Tamas G. Molnar , Katherine L. Bouman , Aaron D. Ames

The control barrier function (CBF) has become a fundamental tool in safety-critical systems design since its invention. Typically, the quadratic optimization framework is employed to accommodate CBFs, control Lyapunov functions (CLFs),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Junjun Xie , Liang Hu , Jiahu Qin , Jun Yang , Huijun Gao

We consider the problem of designing controllers to guarantee safety in a class of nonlinear systems under uncertainties in the system dynamics and/or the environment. We define a class of uncertain control barrier functions (CBFs), and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-20 Vipul K. Sharma , S. Sivaranjani

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Yitaek Kim , Christoffer Sloth

This paper addresses the challenge of integrating explicit hard constraints into the control barrier function (CBF) framework for ensuring safety in autonomous systems, including robots. We propose a novel data-driven method to derive CBFs…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Jaemin Lee , Jeeseop Kim , Aaron D. Ames

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 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

In safety-critical control systems, ensuring both safety and feasibility under sampled-data implementations is crucial for practical deployment. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) frameworks, such as High-Order CBFs (HOCBFs),…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-09 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

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

Safe control with guarantees generally requires the system model to be known. It is far more challenging to handle systems with uncertain parameters. In this paper, we propose a generic algorithm that can synthesize and verify safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-12 Simin Liu , Kai S. Yun , John M. Dolan , Changliu Liu

This contribution introduces a centralized input constrained optimal control framework based on multiple control barrier functions (CBFs) to coordinate connected and automated agents at intersections. For collision avoidance, we propose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-12 Alexander Katriniok

Control Barrier Function (CBF) is an emerging method that guarantees safety in path planning problems by generating a control command to ensure the forward invariance of a safety set. Most of the developments up to date assume availability…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-02 Chuyuan Tao , Wenbin Wan , Junjie Gao , Bihao Mo , Hunmin Kim , Naira Hovakimyan

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

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