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Control barrier function (CBF)-based safety filters provide a systematic way to enforce state constraints, but they can significantly alter the closed-loop dynamics induced by a nominal, stabilizing controller. In particular, the resulting…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-03 Yiting Chen , Pol Mestres , Emiliano Dall'Anese , Jorge Cortés

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

Mobile manipulators promise agile, long-horizon behavior by coordinating base and arm motion, yet whole-body trajectory optimization in cluttered, confined spaces remains difficult due to high-dimensional nonconvexity and the need for fast,…

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

Differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) arise in power networks, chemical processes, and multibody systems, where algebraic constraints encode physical conservation laws. The safety of such systems is critical, yet safe control is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Hongchao Zhang , Mohamad H. Kazma , Meiyi Ma , Taylor T. Johnson , Ahmad F. Taha

This paper tackles the problem of safe and efficient area coverage using a multi-agent system operating in environments with obstacles. Applications such as environmental monitoring and search and rescue require robot swarms to cover large…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-12 Sungjun Seo , Kooktae Lee

Model predictive control (MPC) with control barrier functions (CBF) is a promising solution to address the moving obstacle collision avoidance (MOCA) problem. Unlike MPC with distance constraints (MPC-DC), this approach facilitates early…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-29 Ming Li , Zhiyong Sun , Zirui Liao , Siep Weiland

This work presents a safe control design approach that integrates the disturbance observer (DOB) and the control barrier function (CBF) for systems with external disturbances. Different from existing robust CBF results that consider the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-06 Yujie Wang , Xiangru Xu

Safety is one of the most crucial challenges of autonomous driving vehicles, and one solution to guarantee safety is to employ an additional control revision module after the planning backbone. Control Barrier Function (CBF) has been widely…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Zehang Zhu , Yuning Wang , Tianqi Ke , Zeyu Han , Shaobing Xu , Qing Xu , John M. Dolan , Jianqiang Wang

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

Learning-based control with safety guarantees usually requires real-time safety certification and modifications of possibly unsafe learning-based policies. The control barrier function (CBF) method uses a safety filter containing a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-25 Kanghui He , Shengling Shi , Ton van den Boom , Bart De Schutter

This paper presents a framework for enabling safe velocity control of general robotic systems using data-driven model-free Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Model-free CBFs rely on an exponentially stable velocity controller and a design…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-10 Zhe Shen , Yitaek Kim , Christoffer Sloth

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

This paper works towards unifying two popular approaches in the safety control community: Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). HJ Reachability has methods for direct construction of value functions that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-26 Jason J. Choi , Donggun Lee , Koushil Sreenath , Claire J. Tomlin , Sylvia L. Herbert

Obstacle avoidance is central to safe navigation, especially for robots with arbitrary and nonconvex geometries operating in cluttered environments. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) approaches often rely on analytic clearance…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shuo Liu , Zhe Huang , Calin A. Belta

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide an effective framework for enforcing safety in dynamical systems with scalar constraints. However, many safety constraints are more naturally expressed as matrix-valued conditions, such as positive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Samuel G. Gessow , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames , Brett T. Lopez

We present a closed-form optimal control that satisfies both safety constraints (i.e., state constraints) and input constraints (e.g., actuator limits) using a composition of multiple control barrier functions (CBFs). This main contribution…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-08 Pedram Rabiee , Jesse B. Hoagg

This paper presents a novel approach for synthesizing control barrier functions (CBFs) from high relative degree safety constraints: Rectified CBFs (ReCBFs). We begin by discussing the limitations of existing High-Order CBF approaches and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-06 Pio Ong , Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

High-dimensional robot dynamic trajectory planning poses many challenges for traditional planning algorithms. Existing planning methods suffer from issues such as long computation times, limited capacity to address intricate obstacle…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Lihao Xu , Xiaogang Xiong , Bai Yang , Yunjiang Lou

Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to endow systems with properties of stability and safety, and have been deployed successfully in multiple domains. Despite this success, model uncertainty remains a significant challenge in synthesizing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-12-24 Andrew Taylor , Andrew Singletary , Yisong Yue , Aaron Ames