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The increasing complexity of control systems necessitates control laws that guarantee safety w.r.t. complex combinations of constraints. In this letter, we propose a framework to describe compositional safety specifications with control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-05 Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

In this work, we consider the problem of designing a safety filter for a nonlinear uncertain control system. Our goal is to augment an arbitrary controller with a safety filter such that the overall closed-loop system is guaranteed to stay…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Angela P. Schoellig

Control barrier function (CBF)-based methods provide the minimum modification necessary to formally guarantee safety in the context of quadratic programming, and strict safety guarantee for safety critical systems. However, most CBF-related…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-27 Xiaoxiao Li , Zhirui Sun , Hongpeng Wang , Shuai Li , Jiankun Wang

This paper studies safety and feasibility guarantees for systems with tight control bounds. It has been shown that stabilizing an affine control system while optimizing a quadratic cost and satisfying state and control constraints can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-10 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

Safety is of great importance in multi-robot navigation problems. In this paper, we propose a control barrier function (CBF) based optimizer that ensures robot safety with both high probability and flexibility, using only sensor…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Yuxiang Cui , Longzhong Lin , Xiaolong Huang , Dongkun Zhang , Yue Wang , Rong Xiong

Guaranteeing safety in the presence of unmatched disturbances -- uncertainties that cannot be directly canceled by the control input -- remains a key challenge in nonlinear control. This paper presents a constructive approach to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-04 Max H. Cohen , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames

The existing control barrier function literature generally relies on precise mathematical models to guarantee system safety, limiting their applicability in scenarios with parametric uncertainties. While incremental control techniques have…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-25 Johannes Autenrieb , Hyo-Sang Shin

Optimal control problems with constraints ensuring safety and convergence to desired states can be mapped onto a sequence of real time optimization problems through the use of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and Control Lyapunov Functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-12-10 Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

This paper presents a novel approach for ensuring safe operation of systems subject to input nonlinearities and time-varying safety constraints. We extend the time-varying barrier function framework to address time-varying safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-01 Felix Biertümpfel , Jungbae Chun , Peter Seiler

Control barrier function (CBF)-QP safety filters enforce safety by minimally modifying a nominal controller. While prior work has mainly addressed robustness of safety under uncertainty, robustness of the resulting closed-loop…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-07 Shima Sadat Mousavi , Pol Mestres , Aaron D. Ames

This work explores a collaborative method for ensuring safety in multi-agent formation control problems. We formulate a control barrier function (CBF) based safety filter control law for a generic distributed formation controller and extend…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Brooks A. Butler , Chi Ho Leung , Philip E. Paré

Measurements and state estimates are often imperfect in control practice, posing challenges for safety-critical applications, where safety guarantees rely on accurate state information. In the presence of estimation errors, several prior…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-21 Ersin Das , Rahal Nanayakkara , Xiao Tan , Ryan M. Bena , Joel W. Burdick , Paulo Tabuada , Aaron D. Ames

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

Safety constraints of nonlinear control systems are commonly enforced through the use of control barrier functions (CBFs). Uncertainties in the dynamic model can disrupt forward invariance guarantees or cause the state to be restricted to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-30 Hannah M. Sweatland , Omkar Sudhir Patil , Warren E. Dixon

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have provided a very versatile framework for the synthesis of safe control architectures for a wide class of nonlinear dynamical systems. Typically, CBF-based synthesis approaches apply to systems that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Shuo Yang , Mitchell Black , Georgios Fainekos , Bardh Hoxha , Hideki Okamoto , Rahul Mangharam

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

The problem of safely learning and controlling a dynamical system - i.e., of stabilizing an originally (partially) unknown system while ensuring that it does not leave a prescribed 'safe set' - has recently received tremendous attention in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-10 Jafar Abbaszadeh Chekan , Cedric Langbort

This paper considers the general problem of transitioning theoretically safe controllers to hardware. Concretely, we explore the application of control barrier functions (CBFs) to sampled-data systems: systems that evolve continuously but…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-14 Andrew Singletary , Yuxiao Chen , Aaron D. Ames

We develop a novel adaptation-based technique for safe control design in the presence of multiple control barrier function (CBF) constraints. Specifically, we introduce an approach for synthesizing any number of candidate CBFs into one…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-20 Mitchell Black , Dimitra Panagou