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Recent work showed that stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states while optimizing quadratic costs and observing state and control constraints can be reduced to quadratic programs (QP) by using control barrier functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-02-12 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

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

In a complex real-time operating environment, external disturbances and uncertainties adversely affect the safety, stability, and performance of dynamical systems. This paper presents a robust stabilizing safety-critical controller…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-29 Ersin Daş , Richard M. Murray

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

This paper presents an approach for navigation and control in unmapped environments under input and state constraints using a composite control barrier function (CBF). We consider the scenario where real-time perception feedback (e.g.,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Amirsaeid Safari , Jesse B. Hoagg

This letter studies the dynamical properties of safety filters designed based on Control Barrier Functions (CBF). This mechanism, which is popular in safety-critical applications, takes a nominal controller and minimally modifies it to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Pol Mestres , Shima Sadat Mousavi , Aaron D. Ames

This paper studies the efficient implementation of safety filters that are designed using control barrier functions (CBFs), which minimally modify a nominal controller to render it safe with respect to a prescribed set of states. Although…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-23 Pol Mestres , Shima Sadat Mousavi , Pio Ong , Lizhi Yang , Ersin Das , Joel W. Burdick , Aaron D. Ames

Learning-based controllers, such as neural network (NN) controllers, can show high empirical performance but lack formal safety guarantees. To address this issue, control barrier functions (CBFs) have been applied as a safety filter to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-10 Shuo Yang , Shaoru Chen , Victor M. Preciado , Rahul Mangharam

Control barrier function (CBF)-based safety filters provide a systematic way to enforce state constraints, but they can significantly alter the closed-loop dynamics induced by a nominal, stabilizing controller. In particular, the resulting…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-03 Yiting Chen , Pol Mestres , Emiliano Dall'Anese , Jorge Cortés

Safety filters based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a practical tool for the safety-critical control of autonomous systems. These approaches encode safety through a value function and enforce safety by imposing a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Sander Tonkens , Sylvia Herbert

In this paper, we study the relationship between systems controlled via Control Barrier Function (CBF) approaches and a class of discontinuous dynamical systems, called Projected Dynamical Systems (PDSs). In particular, under appropriate…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-18 Giannis Delimpaltadakis , W. P. M. H. Heemels

This paper introduces the notion of an Input Constrained Control Barrier Function (ICCBF), as a method to synthesize safety-critical controllers for non-linear control affine systems with input constraints. The method identifies a subset of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-15 Devansh Agrawal , Dimitra Panagou

Ensuring the safety of control systems often requires the satisfaction of constraints on states (such as position or velocity), control inputs (such as force), and a mixture of states and inputs (such as power that depends on both velocity…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-19 Laszlo Gacsi , Adam K. Kiss , Ersin Das , Tamas G. Molnar

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

Learning-based control has recently shown great efficacy in performing complex tasks for various applications. However, to deploy it in real systems, it is of vital importance to guarantee the system will stay safe. Control Barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-05 Fernando Castañeda , Jason J. Choi , Wonsuhk Jung , Bike Zhang , Claire J. Tomlin , Koushil Sreenath

Safe real-time control of robotic manipulators in unstructured environments requires handling numerous safety constraints without compromising task performance. Traditional approaches, such as artificial potential fields (APFs), suffer from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Daniel Morton , Marco Pavone

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have recently introduced a systematic tool to ensure system safety by establishing set invariance. When combined with a nominal control strategy, they form a safety-critical control mechanism. However, the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-22 Mohammad Aali , Jun Liu

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…

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have recently been introduced as a systematic tool to ensure safety by establishing set invariance. When combined with a control Lyapunov function (CLF), they form a safety-critical control mechanism.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-22 Mohammad Aali , Jun Liu

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