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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

This paper extends control barrier functions (CBFs) to high order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) that can be used for high relative degree constraints. The proposed HOCBFs are more general than recently proposed (exponential) HOCBFs. We…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-03-15 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta

This paper addresses the problem of guaranteeing safety of multiple coordinated agents moving in dynamic environments. It has recently been shown that this problem can be efficiently solved through the notion of Control Barrier Functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-11 Aurora Haraldsen , Josef Matous , Kristin Y. Pettersen

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

In this paper, we propose a new class of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) that help avoid collisions with kinematic (non-zero velocity) obstacles. While the current forms of CBFs have been successful in…

Ensuring robot safety in complex environments is a difficult task due to actuation limits, such as torque bounds. This paper presents a safety-critical control framework that leverages learning-based switching between multiple backup…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Neil C. Janwani , Ersin Daş , Thomas Touma , Skylar X. Wei , Tamas G. Molnar , Joel W. Burdick

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-27 Ryan K. Cosner , Preston Culbertson , Andrew J. Taylor , Aaron D. Ames

The integration of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in industrial environments, particularly warehouses, has revolutionized logistics and operational efficiency. However, ensuring the safety of human workers in dynamic, shared spaces remains…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Seth Farrell , Chenghao Li , Hongzhan Yu , Ryo Yoshimitsu , Sicun Gao , Henrik I. Christensen

Cooperative transport and manipulation of heavy or bulky payloads by multiple manipulators requires coordinated formation tracking, while simultaneously enforcing strict safety constraints in varying environments with limited communication…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Simiao Zhuang , Bingkun Huang , Zewen Yang

Collision avoidance for robotic manipulators requires enforcing full-body safety constraints in high-dimensional configuration spaces. Control Barrier Function (CBF) based safety filters have proven effective in enabling safe behaviors, but…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Meg Wilkinson , Gilbert Bahati , Ryan M. Bena , Emily Fourney , Joel W. Burdick , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been demonstrated as an effective method for safety-critical control of autonomous systems. Although CBFs are simple to deploy, their design remains challenging, motivating the development of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Bojan Derajić , Sebastian Bernhard , Wolfgang Hönig

A fundamental and classical problem in mobile autonomous systems is maintaining the safety of autonomous agents during deployment. Prior literature has presented techniques using control barrier functions (CBFs) to achieve this goal. These…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 James Usevitch , Jackson Sahleen

Physical human-robot collaboration requires strict safety guarantees since robots and humans work in a shared workspace. This letter presents a novel control framework to handle safety-critical position-based constraints for human-robot…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-11 Yuzhu Sun , Mien Van , Stephen McIlvanna , Sean McLoone , Dariusz Ceglarek

Safety filters based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a practical tool for the safety-critical control of autonomous systems. These approaches encode safety through a value function and enforce safety by imposing a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Sander Tonkens , Sylvia Herbert

Safe control with guarantees generally requires the system model to be known. It is far more challenging to handle systems with uncertain parameters. In this paper, we propose a generic algorithm that can synthesize and verify safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-12 Simin Liu , Kai S. Yun , John M. Dolan , Changliu Liu

Recent advances allow for the automation of food preparation in high-throughput environments, yet the successful deployment of these robots requires the planning and execution of quick, robust, and ultimately collision-free behaviors. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Andrew Singletary , William Guffey , Tamas G. Molnar , Ryan Sinnet , Aaron D. Ames

Control Barrier Function (CBF) is an emerging method that guarantees safety in path planning problems by generating a control command to ensure the forward invariance of a safety set. Most of the developments up to date assume availability…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-02 Chuyuan Tao , Wenbin Wan , Junjie Gao , Bihao Mo , Hunmin Kim , Naira Hovakimyan

Certifying the safety of nonlinear systems, through the lens of set invariance and control barrier functions (CBFs), offers a powerful method for controller synthesis, provided a CBF can be constructed. This paper draws connections between…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-18 Max H. Cohen , Ryan K. Cosner , Aaron D. Ames

Breaking safety constraints in control systems can lead to potential risks, resulting in unexpected costs or catastrophic damage. Nevertheless, uncertainty is ubiquitous, even among similar tasks. In this paper, we develop a novel adaptive…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-17 Shengbo Wang , Ke Li , Yin Yang , Yuting Cao , Tingwen Huang , Shiping Wen

Control barrier functions (CBFs) recently introduced a systematic way to guarantee the system's safety through set invariance. Together with a nominal control method, it establishes a safety-critical control mechanism. The resulting safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-13 Mohammad Aali , Jun Liu