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High-order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) can be used to provide autonomous systems with safety, though computational methods to verify and synthesize these functions remain lacking. In this work, we address this need by formulating SOS…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-06 Ellie Pond , Matthew Hale

Control systems operating in the real world face countless sources of unpredictable uncertainties. These random disturbances can render deterministic guarantees inapplicable and cause catastrophic safety failures. To overcome this, this…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-10 Pol Mestres , Blake Werner , Ryan K. Cosner , Aaron D. Ames

Endowing nonlinear systems with safe behavior is increasingly important in modern control. This task is particularly challenging for real-life control systems that must operate safely in dynamically changing environments. This paper…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-12-06 Tamas G. Molnar , Adam K. Kiss , Aaron D. Ames , Gábor Orosz

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be an effective tool for performing safe control synthesis for nonlinear systems. However, guaranteeing safety in the presence of disturbances and input constraints for high relative degree…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Luzia Knoedler , Oswin So , Ji Yin , Mitchell Black , Zachary Serlin , Panagiotis Tsiotras , Javier Alonso-Mora , Chuchu Fan

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a powerful tool in the design of safety-critical controllers for nonlinear systems. In modern applications, complex systems often involve the feedback interconnection of subsystems evolving…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Stefano Di Gregorio , Guido Carnevale , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) allow for efficient synthesis of controllers to maintain desired invariant properties of safety-critical systems. However, the problem of identifying a CBF remains an open question. As such, this paper…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-11 Prithvi Akella , Apurva Badithela , Richard M. Murray , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions are mathematical constructs used to guarantee safety for robotic systems. When integrated as constraints in a quadratic programming optimization problem, instantaneous control synthesis with real-time performance…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Mohit Srinivasan , Amogh Dabholkar , Samuel Coogan , Patricio Vela

Control barrier functions (CBFs) offer an efficient framework for designing real-time safe controllers. However, CBF-based controllers can be short-sighted, resulting in poor performance, a behaviour which is aggravated in uncertain…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-16 Allan Andre do Nascimento , Antonis Papachristodoulou , Kostas Margellos

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have a well-established theory in Euclidean spaces, yet still lack general formulations and constructive synthesis tools for systems evolving on manifolds common in robotics and aerospace applications. In…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-24 Massimiliano de Sa , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames

Connected automated vehicles have shown great potential to improve the efficiency of transportation systems in terms of passenger comfort, fuel economy, stability of driving behavior and mitigation of traffic congestions. Yet, to deploy…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-04 Tamas G. Molnar , Gabor Orosz , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions (CBFs) play a critical role in the design of safe optimization-based controllers for control-affine systems. Given a CBF associated with a desired ``safe'' set, the typical approach consists in embedding CBF-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-12 Yiting Chen , Pol Mestres , Jorge Cortes , Emiliano Dall'Anese

Discrete-time Control Barrier Functions (DTCBFs) have recently attracted interest for guaranteeing safety and synthesizing safe controllers for discrete-time dynamical systems. This paper addresses the open challenges of verifying candidate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-24 Erfan Shakhesi , W. P. M. H. Heemels , Alexander Katriniok

This paper focuses on safety filters designed based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs): these are modifications of a nominal stabilizing controller typically utilized in safety-critical control applications to render a given subset of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-17 Pol Mestres , Yiting Chen , Emiliano Dall'anese , Jorge Cortés

In emerging control applications involving multiple and complex tasks, safety filters are gaining prominence as a modular approach to enforcing safety constraints. Among various methods, control barrier functions (CBFs) are widely used for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-12 Jason J. Choi , Claire J. Tomlin , Shankar Sastry , Koushil Sreenath

This paper introduces integral control barrier functions (I-CBFs) as a means to enable the safety-critical integral control of nonlinear systems. Importantly, I-CBFs allow for the holistic encoding of both state constraints and input bounds…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-09 Aaron D. Ames , Gennaro Notomista , Yorai Wardi , Magnus Egerstedt

This paper addresses the challenge of integrating explicit hard constraints into the control barrier function (CBF) framework for ensuring safety in autonomous systems, including robots. We propose a novel data-driven method to derive CBFs…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Jaemin Lee , Jeeseop Kim , Aaron D. Ames

The increasing complexity of control systems necessitates control laws that guarantee safety w.r.t. complex combinations of constraints. In this letter, we propose a framework to describe compositional safety specifications with control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-05 Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a principled framework for enforcing safety in control systems -- yet the certified safe operating region in practice is often conservative, especially under input bounds. In many applications,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-07 Pio Ong , David E. J. van Wijk , Massimiliano de Sa , Joel W. Burdick , Aaron D. Ames

Ensuring the safety of complex dynamical systems often relies on Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability Analysis or Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Both methods require computing a function that characterizes a safe set that can be made…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Jixian Liu , Enrique Mallada

Adaptive control has focused on online control of dynamic systems in the presence of parametric uncertainties, with solutions guaranteeing stability and control performance. Safety, a related property to stability, is becoming increasingly…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-12 Johannes Autenrieb , Anuradha M. Annaswamy