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Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have been widely utilized in the design of optimization-based controllers and filters for dynamical systems to ensure forward invariance of a given set of safe states. While CBF-based controllers offer…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-14 Damola Ajeyemi , Saber Jafarpour , Emiliano Dall'Anese

Safe real-time control of robotic manipulators in unstructured environments requires handling numerous safety constraints without compromising task performance. Traditional approaches, such as artificial potential fields (APFs), suffer from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Daniel Morton , Marco Pavone

Latent safety filters extend Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability to operate on latent state representations and dynamics learned directly from high-dimensional observations, enabling safe visuomotor control under hard-to-model constraints.…

Breaking safety constraints in control systems can lead to potential risks, resulting in unexpected costs or catastrophic damage. Nevertheless, uncertainty is ubiquitous, even among similar tasks. In this paper, we develop a novel adaptive…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-17 Shengbo Wang , Ke Li , Yin Yang , Yuting Cao , Tingwen Huang , Shiping Wen

Recent developments in autonomous driving and robotics underscore the necessity of safety-critical controllers. Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a popular method for appending safety guarantees to a general control framework, but they…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Matthew Kim , William Sharpless , Hyun Joe Jeong , Sander Tonkens , Somil Bansal , Sylvia Herbert

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are a popular approach for safe control of nonlinear systems. In CBF-based control, the desired safety properties of the system are mapped to nonnegativity of a CBF, and the control input is chosen to ensure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Hongchao Zhang , Junlin Wu , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik , Andrew Clark

In this paper, we establish a connection between model predictive control (MPC) techniques and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Recognizing the similarity between CBFs and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs), we propose a MPC formulation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-03 Jingyi Huang , Han Wang , Kostas Margellos , Paul Goulart

State and input constraints are ubiquitous in control system design. One recently developed tool to deal with these constraints is control barrier functions (CBF) which transform state constraints into conditions in the input space.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-07 Xiao Tan , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

In this paper, we develop a novel closed-form Control Barrier Function (CBF) and associated controller shield for the Kinematic Bicycle Model (KBM) with respect to obstacle avoidance. The proposed CBF and shield -- designed by an algorithm…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-18 James Ferlez , Mahmoud Elnaggar , Yasser Shoukry , Cody Fleming

This paper takes a step towards addressing the difficulty of constructing Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for parallel safety boundaries. A single CBF for both boundaries has been reported to be difficult to validate for safety, and we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Kwang Hak Kim , Mamadou Diagne , Miroslav Krstić

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

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

Control barrier functions are widely used to enforce safety properties in robot motion planning and control. However, the problem of constructing barrier functions online and synthesizing safe controllers that can deal with the associated…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Kehan Long , Cheng Qian , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

Safety-critical control tasks with high levels of uncertainty are becoming increasingly common. Typically, techniques that guarantee safety during learning and control utilize constraint-based safety certificates, which can be leveraged to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-07 Alexandre Capone , Ryan Cosner , Aaron Ames , Sandra Hirche

This paper presents an approach for navigation and control in unmapped environments under input and state constraints using a composite control barrier function (CBF). We consider the scenario where real-time perception feedback (e.g.,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Amirsaeid Safari , Jesse B. Hoagg

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for developing new robot behaviors. However, typical lack of safety guarantees constitutes a hurdle for its practical application on real robots. To address this issue, safe reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Maeva Guerrier , Hassan Fouad , Giovanni Beltrame

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

Optimal control for safety-critical systems is often dependent on the conservativeness of constraints. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) serve as a medium to represent such constraints, but constructing a minimally conservative CBF is a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-08 Tanmay Dokania , Yashwanth Kumar Nakka

A fundamental and classical problem in mobile autonomous systems is maintaining the safety of autonomous agents during deployment. Prior literature has presented techniques using control barrier functions (CBFs) to achieve this goal. These…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 James Usevitch , Jackson Sahleen