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Robots operating in real world settings must navigate and maintain safety while interacting with many heterogeneous agents and obstacles. Multi-Agent Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have emerged as a computationally efficient tool to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Richard Cheng , Mohammad Javad Khojasteh , Aaron D. Ames , Joel W. Burdick

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

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

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

Over the decades, kinematic controllers have proven to be practically useful for applications like set-point and trajectory tracking in robotic systems. To this end, we formulate a novel safety-critical paradigm for kinematic control in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-22 Andrew Singletary , Shishir Kolathaya , Aaron D. Ames

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

We present a real-time safety filter for motion planning, including those that are learning-based, using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to provide formal guarantees for collision avoidance with road boundaries. A key feature of our…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Jianye Xu , Chang Che , Bassam Alrifaee

Safety has been of paramount importance in motion planning and control techniques and is an active area of research in the past few years. Most safety research for mobile robots target at maintaining safety with the notion of collision…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Manas Gupta , Xuesu Xiao

Sampling-based methods such as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) have been widely used for generating motion paths for autonomous mobile systems. In this work, we extend time-based RRTs with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to generate,…

This paper proposes a safety-critical control design approach for nonlinear control affine systems in the presence of matched and unmatched uncertainties. Our constructive framework couples control barrier function (CBF) theory with a new…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-03 Ersin Das , Joel W. Burdick

Incorporating both flexible and rigid components in robot designs offers a unique solution to the limitations of traditional rigid robotics by enabling both compliance and strength. This paper explores the challenges and solutions for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Zach J. Patterson , Wei Xiao , Emily Sologuren , Daniela Rus

This tutorial paper presents recent work of the authors that extends the theory of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to address practical challenges in the synthesis of safe controllers for autonomous systems and robots. We present novel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-29 Kunal Garg , James Usevitch , Joseph Breeden , Mitchell Black , Devansh Agrawal , Hardik Parwana , Dimitra Panagou

In fields such as mining, search and rescue, and archaeological exploration, ensuring real-time, collision-free navigation of robots in confined, cluttered environments is imperative. Despite the value of established path planning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Manan Tayal , Shishir Kolathaya

This paper addresses the challenge of safe navigation for rigid-body mobile robots in dynamic environments. We introduce an analytic approach to compute the distance between a polygon and an ellipse, and employ it to construct a control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Kehan Long , Khoa Tran , Melvin Leok , Nikolay Atanasov

Collision avoidance is a widely investigated topic in robotic applications. When applying collision avoidance techniques to a mobile robot, how to deal with the spatial structure of the robot still remains a challenge. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Fan Ding , Han Wang , Jianping He , Yi Ren , Yu Zheng

In this paper, we consider a way to safely navigate the robots in unknown environments using measurement data from sensory devices. The control barrier function (CBF) is one of the promising approaches to encode safety requirements of the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-11 Wataru Hashimoto , Kazumune Hashimoto , Akifumi Wachi , Xun Shen , Masako Kishida , Shigemasa Takai

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

In this paper we present the implementation of a Control Barrier Function (CBF) using a quadratic program (QP) formulation that provides obstacle avoidance for a robotic manipulator arm system. CBF is a control technique that has emerged…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Stephen McIlvanna , Nhat Nguyen Minh , Yuzhu Sun , Mien Van , Wasif Naeem

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

In this paper, we focus on non-conservative collision avoidance between robots and obstacles with control affine dynamics and convex shapes. System safety is defined using the minimum distance between the safe regions associated with robots…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Akshay Thirugnanam , Jun Zeng , Koushil Sreenath