English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimization-based Verification of Discrete-time C…

200 papers

In this paper, we investigate safety-critical control problem of discrete-time stochastic systems with incomplete information, where safety constraints must be enforced using state estimates obtained from noisy measurements. We develop an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-15 Jianing Zhao , Zhuoting Cai , Xiang Yin

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool for enforcing set invariance in safety-critical control systems. While guaranteeing safety, most CBF approaches are myopic in the sense that they solve an optimization problem at…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-08-11 Max Cohen , Calin Belta

This tutorial paper presents recent work of the authors that extends the theory of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to address practical challenges in the synthesis of safe controllers for autonomous systems and robots. We present novel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-29 Kunal Garg , James Usevitch , Joseph Breeden , Mitchell Black , Devansh Agrawal , Hardik Parwana , Dimitra Panagou

This paper presents a systematic method for synthesizing a Control Barrier Function (CBF) that encodes predictive information into a CBF. Unlike other methods, the synthesized CBF can account for changes and time-variations in the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-23 Adrian Wiltz , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

Safety is one of the fundamental challenges in control theory. Recently, multi-step optimal control problems for discrete-time dynamical systems were formulated to enforce stability, while subject to input constraints as well as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-14 Shuo Liu , Jun Zeng , Koushil Sreenath , Calin A. Belta

Safety filters based on control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular method to guarantee safety for uncertified control policies, e.g., as resulting from reinforcement learning. Here, safety is defined as staying in a pre-defined…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-19 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Mingxuan Che , Angela P. Schoellig

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been widely applied to safety-critical robotic applications. However, the construction of control barrier functions for robotic systems remains a challenging task. Recently, collision detection using…

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

We develop a novel form of differentiable predictive control (DPC) with safety and robustness guarantees based on control barrier functions. DPC is an unsupervised learning-based method for obtaining approximate solutions to explicit model…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-08-05 Wenceslao Shaw Cortez , Jan Drgona , Aaron Tuor , Mahantesh Halappanavar , Draguna Vrabie

This article presents a systematic method for designing time-varying Control Barrier Functions (CBF) composed of a time-invariant component and multiple time-dependent components, leveraging structural properties of the system dynamics. The…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-10 Adrian Wiltz , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

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

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

A predictive control barrier function (PCBF) based safety filter is a modular framework to verify safety of a control input by predicting a future trajectory. The approach relies on the solution of two optimization problems, first computing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-25 Alexandre Didier , Robin C. Jacobs , Jerome Sieber , Kim P. Wabersich , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Among the promising approaches to enforce safety in control systems, learning Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) from expert demonstrations has emerged as an effective strategy. However, a critical challenge remains: verifying that the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Sumeadh MS , Kevin Dsouza , Ravi Prakash

When deployed in the real world, safe control methods must be robust to unstructured uncertainties such as modeling error and external disturbances. Typical robust safety methods achieve their guarantees by always assuming that the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-05 Ryan K. Cosner , Preston Culbertson , Aaron D. Ames

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

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

We consider safety-critical multi-agent systems with distributed control architectures and potentially varying network topologies. While learning-based distributed control enables scalability and high performance, a lack of formal safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Jonas Ohnemus , Alexandre Didier , Ahmed Aboudonia , Andrea Carron , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Control barrier functions are widely used to synthesize safety-critical controls. The existence of Gaussian-type noise may lead to unsafe actions and result in severe consequences. While studies are widely done in safety-critical control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-05-25 Chuanzheng Wang , Yiming Meng , Stephen L. Smith , Jun Liu