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Related papers: Robust Control Barrier Function Design for High Re…

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We introduce a novel method for mobile robot navigation in dynamic, unknown environments, leveraging onboard sensing and distributionally robust optimization to impose probabilistic safety constraints. Our method introduces a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Kehan Long , Yinzhuang Yi , Zhirui Dai , Sylvia Herbert , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

Over the decades, kinematic controllers have proven to be practically useful for applications like set-point and trajectory tracking in robotic systems. To this end, we formulate a novel safety-critical paradigm for kinematic control in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-22 Andrew Singletary , Shishir Kolathaya , Aaron D. Ames

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) aim to ensure safety by constraining the control input at each time step so that the system state remains within a desired safe region. This paper presents a framework for CBFs in stochastic systems in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-20 Andrew Clark

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

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

Control systems operating in the real world face countless sources of unpredictable uncertainties. These random disturbances can render deterministic guarantees inapplicable and cause catastrophic safety failures. To overcome this, this…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-10 Pol Mestres , Blake Werner , Ryan K. Cosner , Aaron D. Ames

Recent developments in autonomous driving and robotics underscore the necessity of safety-critical controllers. Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a popular method for appending safety guarantees to a general control framework, but they…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Matthew Kim , William Sharpless , Hyun Joe Jeong , Sander Tonkens , Somil Bansal , Sylvia Herbert

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as efficient tools to address the safe navigation problem for robot applications. However, synthesizing informative and obstacle motion-aware CBFs online using real-time sensor data remains…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Xin Yin , Chenyang Liang , Yanning Guo , Jie Mei

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,…

There are two major challenges for scaling up robot navigation around dynamic obstacles: the complex interaction dynamics of the obstacles can be hard to model analytically, and the complexity of planning and control grows exponentially in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Hongzhan Yu , Chiaki Hirayama , Chenning Yu , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

Safe control in dynamic traffic environments remains a major challenge for autonomous vehicles (AVs), as ego vehicle and obstacle states are inherently affected by sensing noise and estimation uncertainty. However, existing studies have not…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Pei Yu Chang , Qizhe Xu , Vishnu Renganathan , Qadeer Ahmed

This paper addresses the problem of safety-critical control for non-affine control systems. It has been shown that optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and control constraints can be sub-optimally reduced to a sequence of quadratic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Wei Xiao , Ross Allen , Daniela Rus

The problem of dynamic locomotion over rough terrain requires both accurate foot placement together with an emphasis on dynamic stability. Existing approaches to this problem prioritize immediate safe foot placement over longer term dynamic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Ruben Grandia , Andrew J. Taylor , Aaron D. Ames , Marco Hutter

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) with assured satisfaction of hard state constraints during training has recently received a lot of attention. Safety filters, e.g., based on control barrier functions (CBFs), provide a promising way for safe…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Yikun Cheng , Pan Zhao , Naira Hovakimyan

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

This paper presents methodologies for ensuring forward invariance of sublevel sets of constraint functions with high-relative-degree with respect to the system dynamics and in the presence of input constraints. We show that such constraint…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-01 Joseph Breeden , Dimitra Panagou

Adaptive control has focused on online control of dynamic systems in the presence of parametric uncertainties, with solutions guaranteeing stability and control performance. Safety, a related property to stability, is becoming increasingly…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-12 Johannes Autenrieb , Anuradha M. Annaswamy

Incorporating both flexible and rigid components in robot designs offers a unique solution to the limitations of traditional rigid robotics by enabling both compliance and strength. This paper explores the challenges and solutions for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Zach J. Patterson , Wei Xiao , Emily Sologuren , Daniela Rus

The safety of training task policies and their subsequent application using reinforcement learning (RL) methods has become a focal point in the field of safe RL. A central challenge in this area remains the establishment of theoretical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Chenggang Wang , Xinyi Wang , Yutong Dong , Lei Song , Xinping Guan

We address the problem of optimizing the performance of a dynamic system while satisfying hard safety constraints at all times. Implementing an optimal control solution is limited by the computational cost required to derive it in real…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-08-19 Wei Xiao , Christos G. Cassandras , Calin A. Belta