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The paper focuses on the design of a control strategy for safety-critical remote teleoperation. The main goal is to make the controlled system track the desired velocity specified by an operator while avoiding obstacles despite…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-21 Riccardo Periotto , Mina Ferizbegovic , Fernando S. Barbosa , Roberto C. Sundin

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are a practical approach for designing safety-critical controllers, but constructing them for arbitrary nonlinear dynamical systems remains a challenge. Recent efforts have explored learning-based methods,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-20 Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Pushpak Jagtap , Shishir Kolathaya

The optimal performance of robotic systems is usually achieved near the limit of state and input bounds. Model predictive control (MPC) is a prevalent strategy to handle these operational constraints, however, safety still remains an open…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-24 Jun Zeng , Bike Zhang , Koushil Sreenath

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

Safety-critical whole-body robot control demands reactive methods that ensure collision avoidance in real-time. Complementarity constraints and control barrier functions (CBF) have emerged as core tools for ensuring such safety constraints,…

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

In this paper, the safety-critical control problem for uncertain systems under multiple control barrier function (CBF) constraints and input constraints is investigated. A novel framework is proposed to generate a safety filter that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-21 Jinyang Dong , Shizhen Wu , Rui Liu , Xiao Liang , Biao Lu , Yongchun Fang

Control barrier functions (CBFs) offer a powerful tool for enforcing safety specifications in control synthesis. This paper deals with the problem of constructing valid CBFs. Given a second-order system and any desired safety set with…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-17 Mohammed Alyaseen , Nikolay Atanasov , Jorge Cortes

This paper extends control barrier functions (CBFs) to high order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) that can be used for high relative degree constraints. The proposed HOCBFs are more general than recently proposed (exponential) HOCBFs. We…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-03-15 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta

This paper studies safety and feasibility guarantees for systems with tight control bounds. It has been shown that stabilizing an affine control system while optimizing a quadratic cost and satisfying state and control constraints can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-10 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

Safety-critical control is a crucial aspect of modern systems, and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have gained popularity as the framework of choice for ensuring safety. However, implementing a CBF requires exact knowledge of the true…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-26 Rahal Nanayakkara , Aaron D. Ames , Paulo Tabuada

This paper develops rollover prevention guarantees for mobile robots using control barrier function (CBF) theory, and demonstrates the method experimentally. We consider a safety measure based on a zero moment point condition through the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-18 Ersin Das , Aaron D. Ames , Joel W. Burdick

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

Artificial potential fields (APFs) and their variants have been a staple for collision avoidance of mobile robots and manipulators for almost 40 years. Its model-independent nature, ease of implementation, and real-time performance have…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Andrew Singletary , Karl Klingebiel , Joseph Bourne , Andrew Browning , Phil Tokumaru , Aaron Ames

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

Adaptive control provides closed-loop stability and reference tracking for uncertain dynamical systems through online parameter adaptation. These properties alone, however, do not ensure safety in the sense of forward invariance of state…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Johannes Autenrieb , Peter A. Fisher , Anuradha Annaswamy

This letter presents a new notion of input-to-state safe control barrier functions (ISSf-CBFs), which ensure safety of nonlinear dynamical systems under input disturbances. Similar to how safety conditions are specified in terms of forward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-14 Shishir Kolathaya , Aaron D. Ames

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

In this paper, we propose a new class of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) that help avoid collisions with kinematic (non-zero velocity) obstacles. While the current forms of CBFs have been successful in…

The safety-critical nature of adaptive cruise control (ACC) systems calls for systematic design procedures, e.g., based on formal methods or control barrier functions (CBFs), to provide strong guarantees of safety and performance under all…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-29 Muhammad Waqas , Muhammad Ali Murtaza , Pierluigi Nuzzo , Petros Ioannou