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Related papers: Constructive Safety-Critical Control: Synthesizing…

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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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) aim to ensure safety by constraining the control input at each time step so that the system state remains within a desired safe region. This paper presents a framework for CBFs in stochastic systems in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-20 Andrew Clark

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

Safety is a fundamental requirement of many robotic systems. Control barrier function (CBF)-based approaches have been proposed to guarantee the safety of robotic systems. However, the effectiveness of these approaches highly relies on the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Hongchao Zhang , Luyao Niu , Andrew Clark , Radha Poovendran

Control barrier function (CBF)-QP safety filters enforce safety by minimally modifying a nominal controller. While prior work has mainly addressed robustness of safety under uncertainty, robustness of the resulting closed-loop…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-07 Shima Sadat Mousavi , Pol Mestres , Aaron D. Ames

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are utilized to ensure the safety of control systems. CBFs act as safety filters in order to provide safety guarantees without compromising system performance. These safety guarantees rely on the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-30 Hongchao Zhang , Manan Tayal , Jackson Cox , Pushpak Jagtap , Shishir Kolathaya , Andrew Clark

In robotics, control barrier function (CBF)-based safety filters are commonly used to enforce state constraints. A critical challenge arises when the relative degree of the CBF varies across the state space. This variability can create…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-09 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Francesco D'Orazio , Angela P. Schoellig

The synthesis of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) often involves demanding computations or a meticulous construction. However, structural properties of the system dynamics and constraints have the potential to mitigate these challenges. In…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-05 Adrian Wiltz , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

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

This paper presents a methodology for ensuring that the composition of multiple Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) always leads to feasible conditions on the control input, even in the presence of input constraints. In the case of a system…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-24 Joseph Breeden , Dimitra Panagou

To bring complex systems into real world environments in a safe manner, they will have to be robust to uncertainties - both in the environment and the system. This paper investigates the safety of control systems under input disturbances,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-03 Anil Alan , Andrew J. Taylor , Chaozhe R. He , Gábor Orosz , Aaron D. Ames

In this paper, we develop a safe control synthesis method that integrates state estimation and parameter estimation within an adaptive optimal control (AOC) and control barrier function (CBF)-based control architecture. The developed…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-24 Tochukwu E. Ogri , Muzaffar Qureshi , Zachary I. Bell , Wanjiku A. Makumi , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

State and input constraints are ubiquitous in control system design. One recently developed tool to deal with these constraints is control barrier functions (CBF) which transform state constraints into conditions in the input space.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-07 Xiao Tan , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

We study the problem of verification and synthesis of robust control barrier functions (CBF) for control-affine polynomial systems with bounded additive uncertainty and convex polynomial constraints on the control. We first formulate robust…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-25 Shucheng Kang , Yuxiao Chen , Heng Yang , Marco Pavone

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been widely used for synthesizing controllers in safety-critical applications. When used as a safety filter, it provides a simple and computationally efficient way to obtain safe controls from a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-13 Bolun Dai , Heming Huang , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

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 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

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 presents a framework for designing provably safe feedback controllers for sampled-data control affine systems with measurement and actuation uncertainties. Based on the interval Taylor model of nonlinear functions, a sampled-data…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-13 Yuhao Zhang , Sequoyah Walters , Xiangru Xu

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