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This paper presents a novel approach for synthesizing control barrier functions (CBFs) from high relative degree safety constraints: Rectified CBFs (ReCBFs). We begin by discussing the limitations of existing High-Order CBF approaches and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-06 Pio Ong , Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Ensuring safe behavior is critical for modern autonomous cyber-physical systems. Control barrier functions (CBFs) are widely used to enforce safety in autonomous systems, yet their placement within networked control architectures remains…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Severin Beger , Yuling Chen , Sandra Hirche

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) with assured satisfaction of hard state constraints during training has recently received a lot of attention. Safety filters, e.g., based on control barrier functions (CBFs), provide a promising way for safe…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Yikun Cheng , Pan Zhao , Naira Hovakimyan

Safety for control systems is often posed as an invariance constraint; the system is said to be safe if state trajectories avoid some unsafe region of the statespace for all time. An assured controller is one that enforces safety online by…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-08-18 Matthew Abate , Samuel Coogan

In this paper, the issue of model uncertainty in safety-critical control is addressed with a data-driven approach. For this purpose, we utilize the structure of an input-ouput linearization controller based on a nominal model along with a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-06-05 Jason Choi , Fernando Castañeda , Claire J. Tomlin , Koushil Sreenath

Guaranteeing safe behaviour of reinforcement learning (RL) policies poses significant challenges for safety-critical applications, despite RL's generality and scalability. To address this, we propose a new approach to apply verification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Daniel C. H. Tan , Fernando Acero , Robert McCarthy , Dimitrios Kanoulas , Zhibin Li

Time delays in feedback control loops can cause controllers to respond too late, and with excessively large corrective actions, leading to unsafe behavior (violation of state constraints) and controller infeasibility (violation of input…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-26 Adam K. Kiss , Ersin Das , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

In this paper, we study Stochastic Control Barrier Functions (SCBFs) to enable the design of probabilistic safe real-time controllers in presence of uncertainties and based on noisy measurements. Our goal is to design controllers that bound…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-03 Shakiba Yaghoubi , Georgios Fainekos , Tomoya Yamaguchi , Danil Prokhorov , Bardh Hoxha

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

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Sumeadh MS , Kevin Dsouza , Ravi Prakash

Motivated by the key role of control barrier functions (CBFs) in assessing safety and enabling the synthesis of safe controllers in nonlinear control systems, this paper presents a suite of converse results on CBFs. Given any safe set, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-13 Pol Mestres , Jorge Cortés

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

In this letter we propose a holistic analysis merging the techniques of passivity-based control (PBC) and control barrier functions (CBF). We constructively find conditions under which passivity of the closed-loop system is preserved under…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Federico Califano

This paper studies the problem of finite-time convergence to a prescribed safe set for nonlinear systems whose initial states violate the safety constraints. Existing Control Lyapunov-Barrier Functions (CLBFs) can enforce recovery to the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-27 Anni Li , Yingqing Chen , Christos G. Cassandras , Wei Xiao

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have recently introduced a systematic tool to ensure system safety by establishing set invariance. When combined with a nominal control strategy, they form a safety-critical control mechanism. However, the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-22 Mohammad Aali , Jun Liu

This work presents a safe control design approach that integrates the disturbance observer (DOB) and the control barrier function (CBF) for systems with external disturbances. Different from existing robust CBF results that consider the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-06 Yujie Wang , Xiangru Xu

Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to endow systems with properties such as stability and safety, and has been deployed successfully across various domains. Despite this success, model uncertainty remains a significant challenge in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-02 Andrew J. Taylor , Victor D. Dorobantu , Sarah Dean , Benjamin Recht , Yisong Yue , Aaron D. Ames

This paper offers a direct data-driven approach for learning robust control barrier certificates (R-CBCs) and robust safety controllers (R-SCs) for discrete-time input-affine polynomial systems with unknown dynamics under…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-22 Omid Akbarzadeh , MohammadHossein Ashoori , Abolfazl Lavaei

Robots operating in real world settings must navigate and maintain safety while interacting with many heterogeneous agents and obstacles. Multi-Agent Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have emerged as a computationally efficient tool to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Richard Cheng , Mohammad Javad Khojasteh , Aaron D. Ames , Joel W. Burdick

Adaptive control provides closed-loop stability and reference tracking for uncertain dynamical systems through online parameter adaptation. These properties alone, however, do not ensure safety in the sense of forward invariance of state…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Johannes Autenrieb , Peter A. Fisher , Anuradha Annaswamy