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Related papers: Safety-Critical Control for Autonomous Systems: Co…

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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 considers the safety-critical control design problem with output measurements. An observer-based safety control framework that integrates the estimation error quantified observer and the control barrier function (CBF) approach is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-24 Yujie Wang , Xiangru Xu

The safety-critical nature of adaptive cruise control (ACC) systems calls for systematic design procedures, e.g., based on formal methods or control barrier functions (CBFs), to provide strong guarantees of safety and performance under all…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-29 Muhammad Waqas , Muhammad Ali Murtaza , Pierluigi Nuzzo , Petros Ioannou

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

Using control barrier functions (CBFs) as safety filters provides a computationally inexpensive yet effective method for constructing controllers in safety-critical applications. However, using CBFs requires the construction of a valid CBF,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Bolun Dai , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordination of robots in dynamic environments. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) with the forward reachable set to guarantee the safe coordination of the robots…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Jeeseop Kim , Jaemin Lee , Aaron D. Ames

Safety is of paramount importance in control systems to avoid costly risks and catastrophic damages. The control barrier function (CBF) method, a promising solution for safety-critical control, poses a new challenge of enhancing control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-26 Shengbo Wang , Ke Li , Zheng Yan , Zhenyuan Guo , Song Zhu , Guanghui Wen , Shiping Wen

Safety filters leveraging control barrier functions (CBFs) are highly effective for enforcing safe behavior on complex systems. It is often easier to synthesize CBFs for a Reduced order Model (RoM), and track the resulting safe behavior on…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-09 William D. Compton , Max H. Cohen , Aaron D. Ames

Construction automation increasingly requires autonomous mobile robots, yet robust autonomy remains challenging on construction sites. These environments are dynamic and often visually occluded, which complicates perception and navigation.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Johannes Mootz , Reza Akhavian

Applications that require multi-robot systems to operate independently for extended periods of time in unknown or unstructured environments face a broad set of challenges, such as hardware degradation, changing weather patterns, or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-16 Yousef Emam , Paul Glotfelter , Sean Wilson , Gennaro Notomista , Magnus Egerstedt

Guaranteeing safety for robotic and autonomous systems in real-world environments is a challenging task that requires the mitigation of stochastic uncertainties. Control barrier functions have, in recent years, been widely used for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-31 Andrew Singletary , Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Aaron D. Ames

With the increasing complexity of real-world systems and varying environmental uncertainties, it is difficult to build an accurate dynamic model, which poses challenges especially for safety-critical control. In this paper, a learning-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-13 Sihua Zhang , Di-Hua Zhai , Xiaobing Dai , Tzu-yuan Huang , Yuanqing Xia , Sandra Hirche

Uncertainties arising in various control systems, such as robots that are subject to unknown disturbances or environmental variations, pose significant challenges for ensuring system safety, such as collision avoidance. At the same time,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Matti Vahs , Jana Tumova

We propose a novel class of risk-aware control barrier functions (RA-CBFs) for the control of stochastic safety-critical systems. Leveraging a result from the stochastic level-crossing literature, we deviate from the martingale theory that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-22 Mitchell Black , Georgios Fainekos , Bardh Hoxha , Danil Prokhorov , Dimitra Panagou

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool to enforce safety of a control system. CBFs are commonly utilized in a quadratic program formulation (CBF-QP) as safety-critical constraints. A class $\mathcal{K}$ function in CBFs…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-12 Hengbo Ma , Bike Zhang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Koushil Sreenath

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are an effective methodology to ensure safety and performative efficacy in real-time control applications such as power systems, resource allocation, autonomous vehicles, robotics, etc. This approach ensures…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-30 Samy Wu Fung , Levon Nurbekyan

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a popular approach to design feedback laws that achieve safety guarantees for nonlinear systems. The CBF-based controller design relies on the availability of a model to select feasible inputs from the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-17 Lukas Lanza , Johannes Köhler , Dario Dennstädt , Thomas Berger , Karl Worthmann

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

This paper considers collision avoidance for vehicles with first-order nonholonomic constraints maintaining nonzero forward speeds, moving within dynamic environments. We leverage the concept of control barrier functions (CBFs) to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-03 Aurora Haraldsen , Martin S. Wiig , Aaron D. Ames , Kristin Y. Pettersen

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for safety-critical controller design for nonlinear systems. Existing design paradigms do not address the gap between theory (controller design with continuous…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-15 Andrew J. Taylor , Victor D. Dorobantu , Ryan K. Cosner , Yisong Yue , Aaron D. Ames