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In order to be effective partners for humans, robots must become increasingly comfortable with making contact with their environment. Unfortunately, it is hard for robots to distinguish between ``just enough'' and ``too much'' force: some…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Charles Dawson , Austin Garrett , Falk Pollok , Yang Zhang , Chuchu Fan

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Jake Gonzales , Kazuki Mizuta , Karen Leung , Lillian J. Ratliff

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-28 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Shimin Wang , Wei Xiao , Martin Guay

Inspired by the success of imitation and inverse reinforcement learning in replicating expert behavior through optimal control, we propose a learning based approach to safe controller synthesis based on control barrier functions (CBFs). We…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-10 Alexander Robey , Haimin Hu , Lars Lindemann , Hanwen Zhang , Dimos V. Dimarogonas , Stephen Tu , Nikolai Matni

Guaranteeing the safety of controllers is vital for real-world applications, but is markedly difficult when the states are not perfectly known and when the control inputs are bounded. Backup control barrier functions (bCBFs) use predictions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-23 David E. J. van Wijk , Tamas G. Molnar , Samuel Coogan , Manoranjan Majji , Aaron D. Ames , Joel W. Burdick

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

Safety filters based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a practical tool for the safety-critical control of autonomous systems. These approaches encode safety through a value function and enforce safety by imposing a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Sander Tonkens , Sylvia Herbert

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

Safety filters leveraging control barrier functions (CBFs) are highly effective for enforcing safe behavior on complex systems. It is often easier to synthesize CBFs for a Reduced order Model (RoM), and track the resulting safe behavior on…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-09 William D. Compton , Max H. Cohen , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a powerful tool for synthesizing safe control actions; however, constructing CBFs remains difficult for general nonlinear systems. In this work, we provide a constructive framework for synthesizing CBFs…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-04 Gilbert Bahati , Ryan K. Cosner , Max H. Cohen , Ryan M. Bena , Aaron D. Ames

The existing control barrier function literature generally relies on precise mathematical models to guarantee system safety, limiting their applicability in scenarios with parametric uncertainties. While incremental control techniques have…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-25 Johannes Autenrieb , Hyo-Sang Shin

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

This letter studies the dynamical properties of safety filters designed based on Control Barrier Functions (CBF). This mechanism, which is popular in safety-critical applications, takes a nominal controller and minimally modifies it to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Pol Mestres , Shima Sadat Mousavi , Aaron D. Ames

The paper focuses on the design of a control strategy for safety-critical remote teleoperation. The main goal is to make the controlled system track the desired velocity specified by an operator while avoiding obstacles despite…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-21 Riccardo Periotto , Mina Ferizbegovic , Fernando S. Barbosa , Roberto C. Sundin

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

This paper presents an adaptive control approach for uncertain nonlinear systems subject to safety constraints that allows for modularity in the selection of the parameter estimation algorithm. Such modularity is achieved by unifying the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-09 Max Cohen , Calin Belta

Verifying the safety of controllers is critical for many applications, but is especially challenging for systems with bounded inputs. Backup control barrier functions (bCBFs) offer a structured approach to synthesizing safe controllers that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-08 David E. J. van Wijk , Ersin Das , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames , Joel W. Burdick

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm in control theory, providing a principled approach to enforcing safety-critical constraints in dynamic systems. This survey paper comprehensively explores the foundational…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-27 Promit Panja

This paper proposes a control design approach for stabilizing nonlinear control systems. Our key observation is that the set of points where the decrease condition of a control Lyapunov function (CLF) is feasible can be regarded as a safe…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-19 Pol Mestres , Kehan Long , Melvin Leok , Nikolay Atanasov , Jorge Cortes

Hybrid dynamical systems are ubiquitous as practical robotic applications often involve both continuous states and discrete switchings. Safety is a primary concern for hybrid robotic systems. Existing safety-critical control approaches for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Shuo Yang , Yu Chen , Xiang Yin , George J. Pappas , Rahul Mangharam