Related papers: Safety-Ensured Robotic Control Framework for Cutti…
Gastrointestinal malignancies constitute a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, with advanced-stage prognosis remaining particularly dismal. Originating as a groundbreaking technique for early gastric cancer treatment,…
The rapid advancement of robotics necessitates robust tools for developing and testing safe control architectures in dynamic and uncertain environments. Ensuring safety and reliability in robotics, especially in safety-critical…
Safely navigating around obstacles while respecting the dynamics, control, and geometry of the underlying system is a key challenge in robotics. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) generate safe control policies by considering system dynamics…
This paper describes the design, manufacture, and performance of a highly dexterous, low-profile, 7 Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) robotic arm for CT-guided percutaneous needle biopsy. Direct CT guidance allows physicians to localize tumours…
Inter-robot collisions pose a significant safety risk when multiple robotic arms operate in close proximity. We present an online collision avoidance methodology leveraging High-Order Control Barrier Functions (HOCBFs) constructed for safe…
The increasing complexity of modern robotic systems and the environments they operate in necessitates the formal consideration of safety in the presence of imperfect measurements. In this paper we propose a rigorous framework for…
Autonomous robot navigation can be particularly demanding, especially when the surrounding environment is not known and safety of the robot is crucial. This work relates to the synthesis of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) through data for…
Autonomous control of the laparoscope in robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) has received considerable research interest due to its potential to improve surgical safety. Despite progress in pixel-level Image-Based Visual…
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…
Safe navigation of autonomous robots remains one of the core challenges in the field, especially in dynamic and uncertain environments. One of the prevalent approaches is safety filtering based on control barrier functions (CBFs), which are…
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…
In this paper, we propose a safety-critical controller based on time-varying control barrier functions (CBFs) for a robot with an unicycle model in the continuous-time domain to achieve navigation and dynamic collision avoidance. Unlike…
Robots deployed in unstructured, real-world environments operate under considerable uncertainty due to imperfect state estimates, model error, and disturbances. Given this real-world context, the goal of this paper is to develop controllers…
This work addresses the challenge of safe and efficient mobile robot navigation in complex dynamic environments with concave moving obstacles. Reactive safe controllers like Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) design obstacle avoidance…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Surgical automation has the capability to improve the consistency of patient outcomes and broaden access to advanced surgical care in underprivileged communities. Shared autonomy, where the robot automates routine subtasks while the surgeon…
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide an elegant framework for constraining nonlinear control system dynamics to remain within an invariant subset of a designated safe set. However, identifying a CBF that balances performance-by…