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Achieving highly dynamic behaviors on humanoid robots, such as running, requires controllers that are both robust and precise, and hence difficult to design. Classical control methods offer valuable insight into how such systems can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Zachary Olkin , Kejun Li , William D. Compton , 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

Safety filters, particularly those based on control barrier functions, have gained increased interest as effective tools for safe control of dynamical systems. Existing correct-by-construction synthesis algorithms for such filters, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Ihab Tabbara , Hussein Sibai

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,…

It has been shown that optimizing quadratic costs while stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states subject to state and control constraints can be reduced to a sequence of Quadratic Programs (QPs) by using Control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-17 Wei Xiao , Christos G. Cassandras , Calin A. Belta

Safety-critical applications require controllers/policies that can guarantee safety with high confidence. The control barrier function is a useful tool to guarantee safety if we have access to the ground-truth system dynamics. In practice,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Athindran Ramesh Kumar , Sulin Liu , Jaime F. Fisac , Ryan P. Adams , Peter J. Ramadge

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

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

In safety-critical control, managing safety constraints with high relative degrees and uncertain obstacle dynamics pose significant challenges in guaranteeing safety performance. Robust Control Barrier Functions (RCBFs) offer a potential…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-06 Kwang Hak Kim , Mamadou Diagne , Miroslav Krstić

Ensuring safety in the sense of constraint satisfaction for learning-based control is a critical challenge, especially in the model-free case. While safety filters address this challenge in the model-based setting by modifying unsafe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-15 Kanghui He , Shengling Shi , Ton van den Boom , Bart De Schutter

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms show amazing performance in recent years, but placing RL in real-world applications such as self-driven vehicles may suffer safety problems. A self-driven vehicle moving to a target position following…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-05 Huanhui Cao , Zhiyuan Cai , Hairuo Wei , Wenjie Lu , Lin Zhang , Hao Xiong

We develop provably safe and convergent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for control of nonlinear dynamical systems, bridging the gap between the hard safety guarantees of control theory and the convergence guarantees of RL theory.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Wesley A. Suttle , Vipul K. Sharma , Krishna C. Kosaraju , S. Sivaranjani , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta , Brian M. Sadler

Safety remains a central obstacle preventing widespread use of RL in the real world: learning new tasks in uncertain environments requires extensive exploration, but safety requires limiting exploration. We propose Recovery RL, an algorithm…

Learning-based methods for constructing control barrier functions (CBFs) are gaining popularity for ensuring safe robot control. A major limitation of existing methods is their reliance on extensive sampling over the state space or online…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-17 Hongzhan Yu , Seth Farrell , Ryo Yoshimitsu , Zhizhen Qin , Henrik I. Christensen , Sicun Gao

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

We address the problem of safe policy learning in multi-agent safety-critical autonomous systems. In such systems, it is necessary for each agent to meet the safety requirements at all times while also cooperating with other agents to…

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the de facto method for achieving locomotion on humanoid robots in practice, yet stability analysis of the corresponding control policies is lacking. Recent work has attempted to merge control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-07 Zachary Olkin , William D. Compton , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier function (CBF) has recently started to serve as a basis to develop approaches for enforcing safety requirements in control systems. However, constructing such function for a general system is a non-trivial task. This paper…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Zihao Liang , Jason King Ching Lo

Control barrier functions have shown great success in addressing control problems with safety guarantees. These methods usually find the next safe control input by solving an online quadratic programming problem. However, model uncertainty…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-24 Chuanzheng Wang , Yinan Li , Yiming Meng , Stephen L. Smith , Jun Liu
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