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Time delays in feedback control loops can cause controllers to respond too late, and with excessively large corrective actions, leading to unsafe behavior (violation of state constraints) and controller infeasibility (violation of input…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-26 Adam K. Kiss , Ersin Das , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

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

This paper introduces a predictive control barrier function (PCBF) framework for enforcing state constraints in discrete-time systems with unknown relative degree, which can be caused by input delays or unmodeled input dynamics. Existing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-02 Juan Augusto Paredes Salazar , James Usevitch , Ankit Goel

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a powerful tool for enforcing safety constraints in control systems, but their direct application to complex, high-dimensional dynamics is often challenging. In many settings, safety certificates are…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Nikolaos Bousias , Charalampia Stamouli , Anastasios Tsiamis , George Pappas

Safety-critical control is imperative for deploying autonomous systems in the real world. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer strong safety guarantees when accurate system and sensor models are available. However, widely used additive,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-17 Rohan Walia , Mitchell Black , Andrew Schoer , Kevin Leahy

Industrial control applications require high performance under strict constraints. Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide principled safety mechanisms, but constructing CBF-based safety filters for large-scale systems is challenging. We…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-09 Kim P. Wabersich , Felix Berkel , Felix Gruber , Sven Reimann

This paper presents a framework for designing provably safe feedback controllers for sampled-data control affine systems with measurement and actuation uncertainties. Based on the interval Taylor model of nonlinear functions, a sampled-data…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-13 Yuhao Zhang , Sequoyah Walters , Xiangru Xu

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are becoming popular tools in guaranteeing safety for nonlinear systems and constraints, and they can reduce a constrained optimal control problem into a sequence of Quadratic Programs (QPs) for affine…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Wei Xiao , Christos G. Cassandras , Calin A. Belta , Daniela Rus

This paper addresses the challenge of ensuring safety and feasibility in control systems using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Existing CBF-based Quadratic Programs (CBF-QPs) often encounter feasibility issues due to mixed relative degree…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-07 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

Control barrier functions guarantee safety but typically require accurate system models. Parametric uncertainty invalidates these guarantees. Existing robust methods maintain safety via worst-case bounds, limiting performance, while modular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-27 Mohammadreza Kamaldar

Balancing safety and performance is one of the predominant challenges in modern control system design. Moreover, it is crucial to robustly ensure safety without inducing unnecessary conservativeness that degrades performance. In this work…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Anil Alan , Andrew J. Taylor , Chaozhe R. He , Aaron D. Ames , Gabor Orosz

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 addresses the challenge of integrating explicit hard constraints into the control barrier function (CBF) framework for ensuring safety in autonomous systems, including robots. We propose a novel data-driven method to derive CBFs…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Jaemin Lee , Jeeseop Kim , Aaron D. Ames

We propose a novel class of risk-aware control barrier functions (RA-CBFs) for the control of stochastic safety-critical systems. Leveraging a result from the stochastic level-crossing literature, we deviate from the martingale theory that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-22 Mitchell Black , Georgios Fainekos , Bardh Hoxha , Danil Prokhorov , Dimitra Panagou

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have seen widespread success in providing forward invariance and safety guarantees for dynamical control systems. A crucial limitation of discrete-time formulations is that CBFs that are nonconcave in their…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-14 James Usevitch , Juan Augusto Paredes Salazar , Ankit Goel

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

This paper addresses learning safe output feedback control laws from partial observations of expert demonstrations. We assume that a model of the system dynamics and a state estimator are available along with corresponding error bounds,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-04 Lars Lindemann , Alexander Robey , Lejun Jiang , Satyajeet Das , Stephen Tu , Nikolai Matni

This paper proposes a safety-critical controller for dynamic and uncertain environments, leveraging a robust environment control barrier function (ECBF) to enhance the robustness against the measurement and prediction uncertainties…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-21 Ying Shuai Quan , Jian Zhou , Erik Frisk , Chung Choo Chung

This work introduces a novel Proxy Control Barrier Function (PCBF) scheme that integrates barrier-based and Lyapunov-based safety-critical control strategies for strict-feedback systems with potentially unknown dynamics. The proposed method…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-13 Yujie Wang , Xiangru Xu

Ensuring the safety of complex dynamical systems often relies on Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability Analysis or Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Both methods require computing a function that characterizes a safe set that can be made…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Jixian Liu , Enrique Mallada