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Control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) and control barrier functions (CBFs) have been used to develop provably safe controllers by means of quadratic programs (QPs), guaranteeing safety in the form of trajectory invariance with respect to a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-21 Matheus F. Reis , A. Pedro Aguiar , Paulo Tabuada

Barrier functions (BFs) characterize safe sets of dynamical systems, where hard constraints are never violated as the system evolves over time. Computing a valid safe set and BF for a nonlinear (and potentially unmodeled), non-autonomous…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-26 Amy K. Strong , Ali Kashani , Claus Danielson , Leila Bridgeman

This paper studies control synthesis for a general class of nonlinear, control-affine dynamical systems under additive disturbances and state-estimation errors. We enforce forward invariance of static and dynamic safe sets and convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-14 Kunal Garg , Dimitra Panagou

Control barrier functions-based quadratic programming (CBF-QP) is gaining popularity as an effective controller synthesis tool for safe control. However, the provable safety is established on an accurate dynamic model and access to all…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-29 Jinfeng Chen , Zhiqiang Gao , Qin Lin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Wei Xiao , Ramin Hasani , Xiao Li , Daniela Rus

Safety filters based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide formal guarantees of forward invariance, but are often difficult to implement in networked dynamical systems. This is due to global coupling and communication requirements.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-07 Emiliano Dall'Anese

Complex control systems are often described in a layered fashion, represented as higher-order systems where the inputs appear after a chain of integrators. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be powerful tools for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-05 Andrew J. Taylor , Pio Ong , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

This tutorial provides a critical review of the practical application of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in robotic safety. While the theoretical foundations of CBFs are well-established, I identify a recurring gap between the mathematical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Taekyung Kim

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been widely used for synthesizing controllers in safety-critical applications. When used as a safety filter, it provides a simple and computationally efficient way to obtain safe controls from a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-13 Bolun Dai , Heming Huang , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

A common assumption on the deployment of safeguarding controllers on the digital platform is that high sampling frequency translates to a small violation of safety. This paper investigates and formalizes this assumption through the lens of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-04 Gilbert Bahati , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames

We introduce a novel approach for safe control design based on the density function. A control density function (CDF) is introduced to synthesize a safe controller for a nonlinear dynamic system. The CDF can be viewed as a dual to the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-09 Joseph Moyalan , Sriram S. K. S Narayanan , Umesh Vaidya

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide an effective framework for enforcing safety in dynamical systems with scalar constraints. However, many safety constraints are more naturally expressed as matrix-valued conditions, such as positive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Samuel G. Gessow , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames , Brett T. Lopez

In this paper, we propose a quadratic programming-based filter for safe and stable controller design, via a Control Barrier Function (CBF) and a Control Lyapunov Function (CLF). Our method guarantees safety and local asymptotic stability…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-02 Han Wang , Kostas Margellos , Antonis Papachristodoulou

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Daniel Morton , Marco Pavone

With the increasing need for safe control in the domain of autonomous driving, model-based safety-critical control approaches are widely used, especially Control Barrier Function (CBF)-based approaches. Among them, Exponential CBF (eCBF) is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Spencer Van Koevering , Yiwei Lyu , Wenhao Luo , John Dolan

Many control applications require that a system be constrained to a particular set of states, often termed as safe set. A practical and flexible method for rendering safe sets forward-invariant involves computing control input using Control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-11 James Usevitch , Kunal Garg , Dimitra Panagou

This paper develops a smooth safety-filtering framework for nonlinear control-affine systems under limited perception. Classical Control Barrier Function (CBF) filters assume global availability of the safety function - its value and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-22 Lyes Smaili , Soulaimane Berkane

We propose a control barrier function (CBF) formulation for enforcing equality and inequality constraints in variational inference. The key idea is to define a barrier functional on the space of probability density functions that encode the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Yinzhuang Yi , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

Control invariant sets play an important role in safety-critical control and find broad application in numerous fields such as obstacle avoidance for mobile robots. However, finding valid control invariant sets of dynamical systems under…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-08 Matti Vahs , Shaohang Han , Jana Tumova

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a powerful tool for the constrained control of nonlinear systems; however, the majority of results in the literature focus on systems subject to a single CBF constraint, making it challenging to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-05 Max H. Cohen , Eugene Lavretsky , Aaron D. Ames