Related papers: Guided by Guardrails: Control Barrier Functions as…

This paper introduces differentiable higher-order control barrier functions (CBF) that are end-to-end trainable together with learning systems. CBFs are usually overly conservative, while guaranteeing safety. Here, we address their…

This paper addresses learning safe output feedback control laws from partial observations of expert demonstrations. We assume that a model of the system dynamics and a state estimator are available along with corresponding error bounds,…

With the increasing presence of robots in our every-day environments, improving their social skills is of utmost importance. Nonetheless, social robotics still faces many challenges. One bottleneck is that robotic behaviors need to be often…

Safety is an essential component for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world scenarios, and is critical during the learning process itself. A natural first approach toward safe RL is to manually specify constraints on…

Ensuring safety in autonomous systems requires controllers that aim to satisfy state-wise constraints without relying on online interaction.While existing Safe Offline RL methods typically enforce soft expected-cost constraints, they…

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool to enforce safety of a control system. CBFs are commonly utilized in a quadratic program formulation (CBF-QP) as safety-critical constraints. A class $\mathcal{K}$ function in CBFs…

Autonomy advances have enabled robots in diverse environments and close human interaction, necessitating controllers with formal safety guarantees. This paper introduces an experimental platform designed for the validation and demonstration…

We present a real-time safety filter for motion planning, including those that are learning-based, using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to provide formal guarantees for collision avoidance with road boundaries. A key feature of our…

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…

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have recently been introduced as a systematic tool to ensure safety by establishing set invariance. When combined with a control Lyapunov function (CLF), they form a safety-critical control mechanism.…

Safety filters based on control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular method to guarantee safety for uncertified control policies, e.g., as resulting from reinforcement learning. Here, safety is defined as staying in a pre-defined…

Learning-based controllers, such as neural network (NN) controllers, can show high empirical performance but lack formal safety guarantees. To address this issue, control barrier functions (CBFs) have been applied as a safety filter to…

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…

Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) plays an important role in applying RL algorithms to safety-critical real-world applications, addressing the trade-off between maximizing rewards and adhering to safety constraints. This work introduces a…

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide a powerful framework for ensuring safety in dynamical systems. However, their application typically relies on full state information, which is often violated in real-world due to the availability of…

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…

Collision avoidance is key for mobile robots and agents to operate safely in the real world. In this work we present SAFER, an efficient and effective collision avoidance system that is able to improve safety by correcting the control…

Guaranteeing safety for robotic and autonomous systems in real-world environments is a challenging task that requires the mitigation of stochastic uncertainties. Control barrier functions have, in recent years, been widely used for…

In collaborative human-robot tasks, safety requires not only avoiding collisions but also ensuring safe, intentional physical contact. We present ContactRL, a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework that directly incorporates contact…