English
Related papers

Related papers: Safe Online Dynamics Learning with Initially Unkno…

200 papers

Safety-critical control is a crucial aspect of modern systems, and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have gained popularity as the framework of choice for ensuring safety. However, implementing a CBF requires exact knowledge of the true…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-26 Rahal Nanayakkara , Aaron D. Ames , Paulo Tabuada

Training-time safety violations have been a major concern when we deploy reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world. This paper explores the possibility of safe RL algorithms with zero training-time safety violations in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been demonstrated as an effective method for safety-critical control of autonomous systems. Although CBFs are simple to deploy, their design remains challenging, motivating the development of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Bojan Derajić , Sebastian Bernhard , Wolfgang Hönig

This paper addresses the problem of safety-critical control for non-affine control systems. It has been shown that optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and control constraints can be sub-optimally reduced to a sequence of quadratic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Wei Xiao , Ross Allen , Daniela Rus

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

This paper considers enforcing safety and stability of dynamical systems in the presence of model uncertainty. Safety and stability constraints may be specified using a control barrier function (CBF) and a control Lyapunov function (CLF),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-17 Kehan Long , Yinzhuang Yi , Jorge Cortes , Nikolay Atanasov

Many systems contain latent variables that make their dynamics partially unidentifiable or cause distribution shifts in the observed statistics between offline and online data. However, existing control techniques often assume access to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-24 Haoming Jing , Yorie Nakahira

Guaranteeing safe behaviour of reinforcement learning (RL) policies poses significant challenges for safety-critical applications, despite RL's generality and scalability. To address this, we propose a new approach to apply verification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Daniel C. H. Tan , Fernando Acero , Robert McCarthy , Dimitrios Kanoulas , Zhibin Li

This paper studies the problem of safe stabilization of control-affine systems under uncertainty. Our starting point is the availability of worst-case or probabilistic error descriptions for the dynamics and a control barrier function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-05 Pol Mestres , Jorge Cortés

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

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

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a theoretical foundation for safety-critical control in robotic systems. However, most existing methods rely on explicit analytical expressions of unsafe state regions, which are often impractical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Songqiao Hu , Zidong Wang , Zeyi Liu , Zhen Shen , Xiao He

Learning-based methods for constructing control barrier functions (CBFs) are gaining popularity for ensuring safe robot control. A major limitation of existing methods is their reliance on extensive sampling over the state space or online…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-17 Hongzhan Yu , Seth Farrell , Ryo Yoshimitsu , Zhizhen Qin , Henrik I. Christensen , Sicun Gao

This paper considers the general problem of transitioning theoretically safe controllers to hardware. Concretely, we explore the application of control barrier functions (CBFs) to sampled-data systems: systems that evolve continuously but…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-14 Andrew Singletary , Yuxiao Chen , Aaron D. Ames

This paper offers a direct data-driven approach for learning robust control barrier certificates (R-CBCs) and robust safety controllers (R-SCs) for discrete-time input-affine polynomial systems with unknown dynamics under…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-22 Omid Akbarzadeh , MohammadHossein Ashoori , Abolfazl Lavaei

In this paper, we propose a deep learning based control synthesis framework for fast and online computation of controllers that guarantees the safety of general nonlinear control systems with unknown dynamics in the presence of input…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-13 Vrushabh Zinage , Rohan Chandra , Efstathios Bakolas

This paper focuses on safety critical control with sector-bounded uncertainties at the plant input. The uncertainties can represent nonlinear and/or time-varying components. We propose a new robust control barrier function (RCBF) approach…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-07 Jyot Buch , Shih-Chi Liao , Peter Seiler

This paper develops a model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) framework for learning online the value function of an infinite-horizon optimal control problem while obeying safety constraints expressed as control barrier functions (CBFs).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Max H. Cohen , Calin Belta

Safety is always one of the most critical principles for a system to be controlled. This paper investigates a safety-critical control scheme for unknown structured systems by using the control barrier function (CBF) method. Benefited from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-17 Shengbo Wang , Bo Lyu , Shiping Wen , Kaibo Shi , Song Zhu , Tingwen Huang

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have emerged as a popular topic in safety critical control due to their ability to provide formal safety guarantees for dynamical systems. Despite their powerful capabilities, the determination of feasible…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-18 Ali Mesbah , Seid H. Pourtakdoust , Alireza Sharifi , Afshin Banazadeh