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This paper proposes a safety-critical control design approach for nonlinear control affine systems in the presence of matched and unmatched uncertainties. Our constructive framework couples control barrier function (CBF) theory with a new…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-03 Ersin Das , Joel W. Burdick

This paper studies the design of controllers that guarantee stability and safety of nonlinear control affine systems with parametric uncertainty in both the drift and control vector fields. To this end, we introduce novel classes of robust…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-12 Max H. Cohen , Calin Belta , Roberto Tron

This letter presents a nonlinear disturbance observer-parameterized control barrier function (DOp-CBF) designed for a robust safety control system under external disturbances. This framework emphasizes that the safety bounds are relevant to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-03 Ziqi Yang , Lihua Xie

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a powerful tool for synthesizing safe control actions; however, constructing CBFs remains difficult for general nonlinear systems. In this work, we provide a constructive framework for synthesizing CBFs…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-04 Gilbert Bahati , Ryan K. Cosner , Max H. Cohen , Ryan M. Bena , Aaron D. Ames

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-12 Hengbo Ma , Bike Zhang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Koushil Sreenath

High-dimensional robot dynamic trajectory planning poses many challenges for traditional planning algorithms. Existing planning methods suffer from issues such as long computation times, limited capacity to address intricate obstacle…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Lihao Xu , Xiaogang Xiong , Bai Yang , Yunjiang Lou

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

This paper presents methodologies for constructing Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for nonlinear, control-affine systems, in the presence of input constraints and bounded disturbances. More specifically, given a constraint function with…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-12 Joseph Breeden , Dimitra Panagou

This tutorial paper presents recent work of the authors that extends the theory of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to address practical challenges in the synthesis of safe controllers for autonomous systems and robots. We present novel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-29 Kunal Garg , James Usevitch , Joseph Breeden , Mitchell Black , Devansh Agrawal , Hardik Parwana , Dimitra Panagou

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

Safety has been a critical issue for the deployment of learning-based approaches in real-world applications. To address this issue, control barrier function (CBF) and its variants have attracted extensive attention for safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-08 Alaa Eddine Chriat , Chuangchuang Sun

This paper investigates the design of a subclass of time-varying Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), specifically that of uniformly time-varying CBFs. Leveraging the fact that CBFs encode a system's dynamic capabilities relative to a state…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-19 Adrian Wiltz , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found limited success beyond simulated applications, and one main reason is the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Real world systems would realistically fail or break…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Richard Cheng , Gabor Orosz , Richard M. Murray , Joel W. Burdick

Guaranteeing safety of perception-based learning systems is challenging due to the absence of ground-truth state information unlike in state-aware control scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a safety guaranteed learning framework for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Wei Xiao , Tsun-Hsuan Wang , Makram Chahine , Alexander Amini , Ramin Hasani , Daniela Rus

This paper addresses the challenge of ensuring safety and feasibility in control systems using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Existing CBF-based Quadratic Programs (CBF-QPs) often encounter feasibility issues due to mixed relative degree…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-07 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

Safety filters leveraging control barrier functions (CBFs) are highly effective for enforcing safe behavior on complex systems. It is often easier to synthesize CBFs for a Reduced order Model (RoM), and track the resulting safe behavior on…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-09 William D. Compton , Max H. Cohen , Aaron D. Ames

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-28 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Shimin Wang , Wei Xiao , Martin Guay

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 (CBFs) are widely used in safety-critical controllers. However, constructing a valid CBF is challenging, especially under nonlinear or non-convex constraints and for high relative degree systems. Meanwhile, finding…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-10-12 Bolun Dai , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

Obtaining a controlled invariant set is crucial for safety-critical control with control barrier functions (CBFs) but is non-trivial for complex nonlinear systems and constraints. Backup control barrier functions allow such sets to be…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-16 David E. J. van Wijk , Samuel Coogan , Tamas G. Molnar , Manoranjan Majji , Kerianne L. Hobbs