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Related papers: Robotic Shepherding in Cluttered and Unknown Envir…

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Recent advances in robotics have enabled the widespread deployment of autonomous robotic systems in complex operational environments, presenting both unprecedented opportunities and significant security problems. Traditional shepherding…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Wenqing Wang , Ye Zhang , Haoyu Li , Jingyu Wang

Planning and control for high-dimensional robot manipulators in cluttered dynamic environments require computational efficiency and robust safety guarantees. Inspired by recent advances in learning configuration-space distance functions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Kehan Long , Ki Myung Brian Lee , Nikola Raicevic , Niyas Attasseri , Melvin Leok , Nikolay Atanasov

This letter presents a novel coarse-to-fine motion planning framework for robotic manipulation in cluttered, unmodeled environments. The system integrates a dual-camera perception setup with a B-spline-based model predictive control (MPC)…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Chen Cai , Ernesto Dickel Saraiva , Ya-jun Pan , Steven Liu

We study the shepherding control problem where a group of "herders" need to orchestrate their collective behaviour in order to steer the dynamics of a group of "target" agents towards a desired goal. We relax the strong assumptions of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-02-22 Andrea Lama , Mario di Bernardo

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

It is promising but challenging to design flocking control for a robot swarm to autonomously follow changing patterns or shapes in a optimal distributed manner. The optimal flocking control with dynamic pattern formation is, therefore,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Chenghao Yu , Dengyu Zhang , Qingrui Zhang

Correct-by-construction techniques, such as control barrier functions (CBFs), can be used to guarantee closed-loop safety by acting as a supervisor of an existing or legacy controller. However, supervisory-control intervention typically…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-05-03 Yuxiao Chen , Ayonga Hereid , Huei Peng , Jessy Grizzle

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have become powerful tools for ensuring safety in nonlinear systems. However, finding valid CBFs that guarantee persistent safety and feasibility remains an open challenge, especially in systems with input…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Taekyung Kim , Robin Inho Kee , Dimitra Panagou

Using control barrier functions (CBFs) as safety filters provides a computationally inexpensive yet effective method for constructing controllers in safety-critical applications. However, using CBFs requires the construction of a valid CBF,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Bolun Dai , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

The control barrier function (CBF) has become a fundamental tool in safety-critical systems design since its invention. Typically, the quadratic optimization framework is employed to accommodate CBFs, control Lyapunov functions (CLFs),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Junjun Xie , Liang Hu , Jiahu Qin , Jun Yang , Huijun Gao

Learning-based methods for constructing control barrier functions (CBFs) are gaining popularity for ensuring safe robot control. A major limitation of existing methods is their reliance on extensive sampling over the state space or online…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-17 Hongzhan Yu , Seth Farrell , Ryo Yoshimitsu , Zhizhen Qin , Henrik I. Christensen , Sicun Gao

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

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

Autonomy advances have enabled robots in diverse environments and close human interaction, necessitating controllers with formal safety guarantees. This paper introduces an experimental platform designed for the validation and demonstration…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Bhavya Giri Goswami , Manan Tayal , Karthik Rajgopal , Pushpak Jagtap , Shishir Kolathaya

Optimal control problems with constraints ensuring safety and convergence to desired states can be mapped onto a sequence of real time optimization problems through the use of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and Control Lyapunov Functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-12-10 Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

The environments in which the collaboration of a robot would be the most helpful to a person are frequently uncontrolled and cluttered with many objects present. Legible robot arm motion is crucial in tasks like these in order to avoid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Melanie Schmidt-Wolf , Tyler Becker , Denielle Oliva , Monica Nicolescu , David Feil-Seifer

In this paper, we address the problem of safe trajectory planning for autonomous search and exploration in constrained, cluttered environments. Guaranteeing safe (collision-free) trajectories is a challenging problem that has garnered…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Cameron Lerch , Dayi Dong , Ian Abraham

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,…

Recently, the navigation of mobile robots in unknown environments has become a particularly significant research topic. Previous studies have primarily employed real-time environmental mapping using cameras and LiDAR, along with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yusuke Tsunoda , Shoken Otsuka , Kazuki Ito , Runze Xiao , Keisuke Naniwa , Yuichiro Sueoka , Koichi Osuka

We propose a learning-based Control Barrier Function (CBF) to reduce conservatism in collision avoidance for car-like robots. Traditional CBFs often use the Euclidean distance between robots' centers as a safety margin, which neglects their…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Jianye Xu , Bassam Alrifaee