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High-order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) can be used to provide autonomous systems with safety, though computational methods to verify and synthesize these functions remain lacking. In this work, we address this need by formulating SOS…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-06 Ellie Pond , Matthew Hale

Ensuring safe exploration in high-dimensional systems with unknown dynamics remains a significant challenge. Existing safe reinforcement learning methods often provide safety guarantees only in expectation, which can still lead to safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rahul Narava , Siddharth Verma , Ojas Jain , Shashi Shekhar Jha , Mayank Shekhar Jha

In safety-critical control systems, ensuring both system safety and smooth control input is essential for practical deployment. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) frameworks, especially High-Order CBFs (HOCBFs), effectively enforce…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-11 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

Safety is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. Recently, a quadratic program-based control barrier function (CBF) method has emerged as a way to enforce safety-critical constraints. Together with control Lyapunov function (CLF), it…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-03 Jun Zeng , Bike Zhang , Zhongyu Li , Koushil Sreenath

This paper addresses the problem of guaranteeing safety of multiple coordinated agents moving in dynamic environments. It has recently been shown that this problem can be efficiently solved through the notion of Control Barrier Functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-11 Aurora Haraldsen , Josef Matous , Kristin Y. Pettersen

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

This paper develops certificates that propagate compatibility of multiple control barrier function (CBF) constraints from sampled vertices to their convex hull. Under mild concavity and affinity assumptions, we present three sufficient…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-21 Shima Sadat Mousavi , Xiao Tan , Aaron D. Ames

The 2021 paper "Control barrier functions for stochastic systems" provides theorems that give almost sure safety guarantees given stochastic zero control barrier function (ZCBF). Unfortunately, both the theorem and its proof is invalid. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-06 Oswin So , Andrew Clark , Chuchu Fan

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

Autonomous robot navigation can be particularly demanding, especially when the surrounding environment is not known and safety of the robot is crucial. This work relates to the synthesis of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) through data for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Marvin Harms , Mihir Kulkarni , Nikhil Khedekar , Martin Jacquet , Kostas Alexis

Enforcing multiple constraints based on the concept of control barrier functions (CBFs) is a remaining challenge because each of the CBFs requires a condition on the control inputs to be satisfied which may easily lead to infeasibility…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Mark Spiller , Emilia Isbono , Philipp Schitz

Inspired by the success of control barrier functions (CBFs) in addressing safety, and the rise of data-driven techniques for modeling functions, we propose a non-parametric approach for online synthesis of CBFs using Gaussian Processes…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-08-03 Mouhyemen Khan , Tatsuya Ibuki , Abhijit Chatterjee

We consider the problem of safely exploring a static and unknown environment while learning valid control barrier functions (CBFs) from sensor data. Existing works either assume known environments, target specific dynamics models, or use…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-03 Paul Lutkus , Deepika Anantharaman , Stephen Tu , Lars Lindemann

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide an effective framework for enforcing safety in dynamical systems with scalar constraints. However, many safety constraints are more naturally expressed as matrix-valued conditions, such as positive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Samuel G. Gessow , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames , Brett T. Lopez

This paper proposes a safety controller for control-affine nonlinear systems with unmodelled dynamics and disturbances to improve closed-loop robustness. Uncertainty estimation-based control barrier functions (CBFs) are utilized to ensure…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Ersin Daş , Skylar X. Wei , Joel W. Burdick

In this paper we consider the safety verification and safe controller synthesis problems for nonlinear control systems. The Control Barrier Certificates (CBC) approach is proposed as an extension to the Barrier certificates approach. Our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-22 Han Wang , Kostas Margellos , Antonis Papachristodoulou

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

This paper presents extensions of control barrier function (CBF) theory to systems with disturbances wherein a controller only receives measurements infrequently and operates open-loop between measurements, while still satisfying state…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-05 Joseph Breeden , Luca Zaccarian , Dimitra Panagou

This work explores a collaborative method for ensuring safety in multi-agent formation control problems. We formulate a control barrier function (CBF) based safety filter control law for a generic distributed formation controller and extend…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Brooks A. Butler , Chi Ho Leung , Philip E. Paré

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a popular tool for safety certification of nonlinear dynamical control systems. Recently, CBFs represented as neural networks have shown great promise due to their expressiveness and applicability to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Nikolaus Vertovec , Frederik Baymler Mathiesen , Thom Badings , Luca Laurenti , Alessandro Abate