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Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to endow systems with properties such as stability and safety, and has been deployed successfully across various domains. Despite this success, model uncertainty remains a significant challenge in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-02 Andrew J. Taylor , Victor D. Dorobantu , Sarah Dean , Benjamin Recht , Yisong Yue , Aaron D. Ames

We present a novel technique for online safety verification of autonomous systems, which performs reachability analysis efficiently for both bounded and unbounded horizons by employing neural barrier certificates. Our approach uses barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-30 Alessandro Abate , Sergiy Bogomolov , Alec Edwards , Kostiantyn Potomkin , Sadegh Soudjani , Paolo Zuliani

Reinforcement learning (RL), while powerful and expressive, can often prioritize performance at the expense of safety. Yet safety violations can lead to catastrophic outcomes in real-world deployments. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Lizhi Yang , Blake Werner , Massimiliano de Sa , Aaron D. Ames

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide a powerful framework for ensuring safety in dynamical systems. However, their application typically relies on full state information, which is often violated in real-world due to the availability of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-19 Vaishnavi Jagabathula , Ahan Basu , Pushpak Jagtap

We present a novel method for designing higher-order Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) that guarantee convergence to a safe set within a user-specified finite. Traditional Higher Order CBFs (HOCBFs) ensure asymptotic safety but lack…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-21 Janani S K , Shishir Kolathaya

This paper presents a formal framework for collision avoidance in multi-robot systems, wherein an existing controller is modified in a minimally invasive fashion to ensure safety. We build this framework through the use of control barrier…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-05 Li Wang , Aaron Ames , Magnus Egerstedt

Control barrier function (CBF) safety filters emerged as a popular framework to certify and modify potentially unsafe control inputs, for example, provided by a reinforcement learning agent or a non-expert user. Typical CBF safety filter…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-04 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Angela P. Schoellig

Bringing dynamic robots into the wild requires a tenuous balance between performance and safety. Yet controllers designed to provide robust safety guarantees often result in conservative behavior, and tuning these controllers to find the…

Safety is of great importance in multi-robot navigation problems. In this paper, we propose a control barrier function (CBF) based optimizer that ensures robot safety with both high probability and flexibility, using only sensor…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Yuxiang Cui , Longzhong Lin , Xiaolong Huang , Dongkun Zhang , Yue Wang , Rong Xiong

Optimal control strategies are often combined with safety certificates to ensure both performance and safety in safety-critical systems. A prominent example is combining Model Predictive Control (MPC) with Control Barrier Functions (CBF).…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-05 Kerim Dzhumageldyev , Filippo Airaldi , Azita Dabiri

Ensuring safety in autonomous systems requires controllers that aim to satisfy state-wise constraints without relying on online interaction.While existing Safe Offline RL methods typically enforce soft expected-cost constraints, they…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Mumuksh Tayal , Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya , Ravi Prakash

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

Robots deployed in unstructured, real-world environments operate under considerable uncertainty due to imperfect state estimates, model error, and disturbances. Given this real-world context, the goal of this paper is to develop controllers…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-27 Ryan K. Cosner , Preston Culbertson , Andrew J. Taylor , Aaron D. Ames

We introduce a novel approach for safe control design based on the density function. A control density function (CDF) is introduced to synthesize a safe controller for a nonlinear dynamic system. The CDF can be viewed as a dual to the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-09 Joseph Moyalan , Sriram S. K. S Narayanan , Umesh Vaidya

Safety is a critical property for control systems in medicine, transportation, manufacturing, and other applications, and can be defined as ensuring positive invariance of a predefined safe set. This paper investigates the problems of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-12 Andrew Clark

This paper presents a safe learning framework that employs an adaptive model learning algorithm together with barrier certificates for systems with possibly nonstationary agent dynamics. To extract the dynamic structure of the model, we use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-07 Motoya Ohnishi , Li Wang , Gennaro Notomista , Magnus Egerstedt

The rapid integration of AI algorithms in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and healthcare is raising significant concerns about the ability to meet stringent safety standards. Traditional tools for formal safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Oliver Schön , Zhengang Zhong , Sadegh Soudjani

Safe navigation for an ego vehicle in uncertain environments characterized by dynamic obstacles with unknown nonlinear dynamics is a challenging problem of significant practical interest. Existing approaches in the literature either lack…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-17 Jiwon Lee , Hugo Matias , Daniel Silvestre , Thinh T. Doan

This paper addresses the problem of safety-critical control for systems with unknown dynamics. It has been shown that stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states while optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-31 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

Industrial control applications require high performance under strict constraints. Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide principled safety mechanisms, but constructing CBF-based safety filters for large-scale systems is challenging. We…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-09 Kim P. Wabersich , Felix Berkel , Felix Gruber , Sven Reimann