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

Safe real-time control of robotic manipulators in unstructured environments requires handling numerous safety constraints without compromising task performance. Traditional approaches, such as artificial potential fields (APFs), suffer from…

In collaborative human-robot environments, the unpredictable and dynamic nature of human motion can lead to situations where collisions become unavoidable. In such cases, it is essential for the robotic system to proactively mitigate…

Designing safety-critical control for robotic manipulators is challenging, especially in a cluttered environment. First, the actual trajectory of a manipulator might deviate from the planned one due to the complex collision environments and…

Safe navigation in unknown and cluttered environments remains a challenging problem in robotics. Model Predictive Contour Control (MPCC) has shown promise for performant obstacle avoidance by enabling precise and agile trajectory tracking,…

Autonomous spacecraft inspection and docking missions require controllers that can guarantee safety under thrust constraints and uncertainty. Input-constrained control barrier functions (ICCBFs) provide a framework for safety certification…

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a theoretical foundation for safety-critical control in robotic systems. However, most existing methods rely on explicit analytical expressions of unsafe state regions, which are often impractical…

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

Safety is an indispensable requirement for applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real problems. Although there has been a surge of safe RL algorithms proposed in recent years, most existing work typically 1) relies on receiving numeric…

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

We propose Convex Constraint Learning for Reinforcement Learning (CoCoRL), a novel approach for inferring shared constraints in a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) from a set of safe demonstrations with possibly different reward…

Multi-robot systems (MRS) are essential for large-scale applications such as disaster response, material transport, and warehouse logistics, yet ensuring robust, safety-aware formation control in cluttered and dynamic environments remains a…

This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordinated control of cooperative robots locomoting in the presence of fixed (holonomic) constraints. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) to ensure the safe…

Control barrier functions guarantee safety but typically require accurate system models. Parametric uncertainty invalidates these guarantees. Existing robust methods maintain safety via worst-case bounds, limiting performance, while modular…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in various robotics applications, yet its deployment on real systems is still limited due to safety and operational constraints. The safe RL field has gained considerable attention in recent…

Vanilla Reinforcement Learning (RL) can efficiently solve complex tasks but does not provide any guarantees on system behavior. To bridge this gap, we propose a three-step safe RL procedure for continuous action spaces that provides…

Among the promising approaches to enforce safety in control systems, learning Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) from expert demonstrations has emerged as an effective strategy. However, a critical challenge remains: verifying that the…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled vast performance improvements for robotics systems. To achieve these results though, the agent often must randomly explore the environment, which for safety critical systems presents a significant…

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are a practical approach for designing safety-critical controllers, but constructing them for arbitrary nonlinear dynamical systems remains a challenge. Recent efforts have explored learning-based methods,…

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…

While control barrier functions (CBFs) are employed in addressing safety, control synthesis methods based on them generally rely on accurate system dynamics. This is a critical limitation, since the dynamics of complex systems are often not…