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Control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool to enforce safety of a control system. CBFs are commonly utilized in a quadratic program formulation (CBF-QP) as safety-critical constraints. A class $\mathcal{K}$ function in CBFs…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-12 Hengbo Ma , Bike Zhang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Koushil Sreenath

Robot motion planning is central to real-world autonomous applications, such as self-driving cars, persistence surveillance, and robotic arm manipulation. One challenge in motion planning is generating control signals for nonlinear systems…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-08 Guang Yang , Bee Vang , Zachary Serlin , Calin Belta , Roberto Tron

Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller is used to solve unconstrained optimal control problems and Control Barrier Function (CBF) is a tool to impose strict inequality constraints, a.k.a, barrier constraints. In this work, we…

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are a powerful tool for ensuring robotic safety, but designing or learning valid CBFs for complex systems is a significant challenge. While Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability provides a formal method for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Sander Tonkens , Sosuke Kojima , Chenhao Liu , Judy Masri , Sylvia Herbert

Safety is a central requirement for autonomous system operation across domains. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis can be used to construct "least-restrictive" safety filters that result in infrequent, but often extreme, control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Athindran Ramesh Kumar , Kai-Chieh Hsu , Peter J. Ramadge , Jaime F. Fisac

Safe autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains a critical challenge for robots with limited sensing capabilities. While safety-critical control techniques, such as Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), have been proposed to ensure…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Taekyung Kim , Dimitra Panagou

Construction automation increasingly requires autonomous mobile robots, yet robust autonomy remains challenging on construction sites. These environments are dynamic and often visually occluded, which complicates perception and navigation.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Johannes Mootz , Reza Akhavian

In this paper, we propose a safety-critical controller based on time-varying control barrier functions (CBFs) for a robot with an unicycle model in the continuous-time domain to achieve navigation and dynamic collision avoidance. Unlike…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Jihao Huang , Zhitao Liu , Jun Zeng , Xuemin Chi , Hongye Su

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

We introduce the notion of importance sampling under embedded barrier state control, titled Safety Controlled Model Predictive Path Integral Control (SC-MPPI). For robotic systems operating in an environment with multiple constraints, hard…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-08 Manan Gandhi , Hassan Almubarak , Evangelos Theodorou

In collaborative human-robot environments, the unpredictable and dynamic nature of human motion can lead to situations where collisions become unavoidable. In such cases, it is essential for the robotic system to proactively mitigate…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Patanjali Maithani , Aliasghar Arab , Farshad Khorrami , Prashanth Krishnamurthy

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a simple yet effective way for safe control synthesis. Recently, work has been done using differentiable optimization (diffOpt) based methods to systematically construct CBFs for static obstacle…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Bolun Dai , Rooholla Khorrambakht , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

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 motion planning is essential for autonomous vessel operations, especially in challenging spaces such as narrow inland waterways. However, conventional motion planning approaches are often computationally intensive or overly…

Obstacle avoidance of polytopic obstacles by polytopic robots is a challenging problem in optimization-based control and trajectory planning. Many existing methods rely on smooth geometric approximations, such as hyperspheres or ellipsoids,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Shuo Liu , Zhe Huang , Calin A. Belta

Sampling-based motion planning methods for manipulators in crowded environments often suffer from expensive collision checking and high sampling complexity, which make them difficult to use in real time. To address this issue, we propose a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Mingxin Yu , Chenning Yu , M-Mahdi Naddaf-Sh , Devesh Upadhyay , Sicun Gao , Chuchu Fan

Safe navigation of autonomous robots remains one of the core challenges in the field, especially in dynamic and uncertain environments. One of the prevalent approaches is safety filtering based on control barrier functions (CBFs), which are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Bojan Derajić , Sebastian Bernhard , Wolfgang Hönig

Safety filters leveraging control barrier functions (CBFs) are highly effective for enforcing safe behavior on complex systems. It is often easier to synthesize CBFs for a Reduced order Model (RoM), and track the resulting safe behavior on…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-09 William D. Compton , Max H. Cohen , Aaron D. Ames

In this paper, we present a novel probabilistic safe control framework for human-robot interaction that combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with conformal risk control to provide formal safety guarantees while considering complex…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Jake Gonzales , Kazuki Mizuta , Karen Leung , Lillian J. Ratliff

Obstacle avoidance between polytopes is a challenging topic for optimal control and optimization-based trajectory planning problems. Existing work either solves this problem through mixed-integer optimization, relying on simplification of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Akshay Thirugnanam , Jun Zeng , Koushil Sreenath