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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

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

Learning-based control approaches have shown great promise in performing complex tasks directly from high-dimensional perception data for real robotic systems. Nonetheless, the learned controllers can behave unexpectedly if the trajectories…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Fernando Castañeda , Haruki Nishimura , Rowan McAllister , Koushil Sreenath , Adrien Gaidon

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

Safe control with guarantees generally requires the system model to be known. It is far more challenging to handle systems with uncertain parameters. In this paper, we propose a generic algorithm that can synthesize and verify safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-12 Simin Liu , Kai S. Yun , John M. Dolan , Changliu Liu

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

Dynamic obstacle avoidance is a challenging topic for optimal control and optimization-based trajectory planning problems. Many existing works use Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to enforce safety constraints for control systems. CBFs are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Shuo Liu , Yihui Mao , Calin A. Belta

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

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

Set invariance techniques such as control barrier functions (CBFs) can be used to enforce time-varying constraints such as keeping a safe distance from dynamic objects. However, existing methods for enforcing time-varying constraints often…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Yitaek Kim , Christoffer Sloth

Ensuring robot safety in complex environments is a difficult task due to actuation limits, such as torque bounds. This paper presents a safety-critical control framework that leverages learning-based switching between multiple backup…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Neil C. Janwani , Ersin Daş , Thomas Touma , Skylar X. Wei , Tamas G. Molnar , Joel W. Burdick

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

We propose integrating an approximation of a predictive control barrier function (PCBF) in a safety filter framework, resulting in a prediction horizon independent formulation. The PCBF is defined through the value function of an optimal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-26 Alexandre Didier , Melanie N. Zeilinger

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) have been widely applied to safety-critical robotic applications. However, the construction of control barrier functions for robotic systems remains a challenging task. Recently, collision detection using…

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

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

Sampling-based motion planning methods for manipulators in crowded environments often suffer from expensive collision checking and high sampling complexity, which make them difficult to use in real time. To address this issue, we propose a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Mingxin Yu , Chenning Yu , M-Mahdi Naddaf-Sh , Devesh Upadhyay , Sicun Gao , Chuchu Fan

Modern autonomous systems, such as flying, legged, and wheeled robots, are generally characterized by high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics, which presents challenges for model-based safety-critical control design. Motivated by the success of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-21 Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames