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Related papers: Safe Control Design through Risk-Tunable Control B…

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Designing provably safe control is a core problem in trustworthy autonomy. However, most prior work in this regard assumes either that the system dynamics are known or deterministic, or that the state and action space are finite,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xinhang Ma , Junlin Wu , Yiannis Kantaros , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

Control barrier function (CBF) has recently started to serve as a basis to develop approaches for enforcing safety requirements in control systems. However, constructing such function for a general system is a non-trivial task. This paper…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Zihao Liang , Jason King Ching Lo

This paper introduces differentiable higher-order control barrier functions (CBF) that are end-to-end trainable together with learning systems. CBFs are usually overly conservative, while guaranteeing safety. Here, we address their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Wei Xiao , Ramin Hasani , Xiao Li , Daniela Rus

Ensuring safety in multi-agent systems is a significant challenge, particularly in settings where centralized coordination is impractical. In this work, we propose a novel risk-sensitive safety filter for discrete-time multi-agent systems…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-19 Armin Lederer , Erfaun Noorani , Andreas Krause

Safety constraints of nonlinear control systems are commonly enforced through the use of control barrier functions (CBFs). Uncertainties in the dynamic model can disrupt forward invariance guarantees or cause the state to be restricted to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-30 Hannah M. Sweatland , Omkar Sudhir Patil , Warren E. Dixon

Obtaining control barrier functions (CBFs) with large safe sets for complex nonlinear systems and constraints is a challenging task. Predictive CBFs address this issue by using an online finite-horizon optimal control problem that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-27 Kanghui He , Anil Alan , Shengling Shi , Ton van den Boom , Bart De Schutter

This work proposes an optimal safe controller minimizing an infinite horizon cost functional subject to control barrier functions (CBFs) safety conditions. The constrained optimal control problem is reformulated as a minimization problem of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-02-03 Hassan Almubarak , Evangelos A. Theodorou , Nader Sadegh

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

This paper presents a comprehensive approach for the safety-critical control of robotic manipulators operating in dynamic environments. Building upon the framework of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), we extend the collision cone…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Lucas Almeida

Time delays in feedback control loops can cause controllers to respond too late, and with excessively large corrective actions, leading to unsafe behavior (violation of state constraints) and controller infeasibility (violation of input…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-26 Adam K. Kiss , Ersin Das , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

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

Ensuring safety for autonomous systems under uncertainty remains challenging, particularly when safety of the true state is required despite the true state not being fully known. Control barrier functions (CBFs) have become widely adopted…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-26 Ruoyu Lin , Magnus Egerstedt

This paper investigates the design of a subclass of time-varying Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), specifically that of uniformly time-varying CBFs. Leveraging the fact that CBFs encode a system's dynamic capabilities relative to a state…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-19 Adrian Wiltz , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

In this paper, we address the problem of closed-loop control of nonlinear dynamical systems subjected to probabilistic uncertainties. More precisely, we design time-varying polynomial feedback controllers to follow the given nominal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-10 Ashkan Jasour , Brian Williams

Safety assurance is critical in the planning and control of robotic systems. For robots operating in the real world, the safety-critical design often needs to explicitly address uncertainties and the pre-computed guarantees often rely on…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Hao Zhou , Yanze Zhang , Wenhao Luo

This paper studies the efficient implementation of safety filters that are designed using control barrier functions (CBFs), which minimally modify a nominal controller to render it safe with respect to a prescribed set of states. Although…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-23 Pol Mestres , Shima Sadat Mousavi , Pio Ong , Lizhi Yang , Ersin Das , Joel W. Burdick , Aaron D. Ames

This paper develops a new control design for guaranteeing a vehicle's safety during lane change maneuvers in a complex traffic environment. The proposed method uses a finite state machine (FSM), where a quadratic program based optimization…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-24 Suiyi He , Jun Zeng , Bike Zhang , Koushil Sreenath

This paper presents a novel approach for synthesizing control barrier functions (CBFs) from high relative degree safety constraints: Rectified CBFs (ReCBFs). We begin by discussing the limitations of existing High-Order CBF approaches and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-06 Pio Ong , Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Correct-by-construction techniques, such as control barrier functions (CBFs), can be used to guarantee closed-loop safety by acting as a supervisor of an existing or legacy controller. However, supervisory-control intervention typically…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-05-03 Yuxiao Chen , Ayonga Hereid , Huei Peng , Jessy Grizzle

Obstacle avoidance is central to safe navigation, especially for robots with arbitrary and nonconvex geometries operating in cluttered environments. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) approaches often rely on analytic clearance…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shuo Liu , Zhe Huang , Calin A. Belta