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This paper addresses the challenge of safe navigation for rigid-body mobile robots in dynamic environments. We introduce an analytic approach to compute the distance between a polygon and an ellipse, and employ it to construct a control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Kehan Long , Khoa Tran , Melvin Leok , Nikolay Atanasov

Safe control in unknown environments is a significant challenge in robotics. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are widely used to guarantee system safety, they often assume known environments with predefined obstacles. The proposed…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Golnaz Raja , Teemu Mökkönen , Reza Ghabcheloo

Autonomous navigation through unstructured and dynamically-changing environments is a complex task that continues to present many challenges for modern roboticists. In particular, legged robots typically possess manipulable asymmetric…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Ryan M. Bena , Gilbert Bahati , Blake Werner , Ryan K. Cosner , Lizhi Yang , Aaron D. Ames

In this paper, a safety-critical control strategy for a nonholonomic robot is developed to generate control signals that result in optimal, obstacle-free paths through dynamic environments. We formulate the control synthesis problem as an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-04 Nhat Nguyen Minh , Stephen McIlvanna , Yuzhu Sun , Yan Jin , Mien Van

Collision avoidance is a widely investigated topic in robotic applications. When applying collision avoidance techniques to a mobile robot, how to deal with the spatial structure of the robot still remains a challenge. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Fan Ding , Han Wang , Jianping He , Yi Ren , Yu Zheng

Robots operating in everyday environments must navigate and manipulate within densely cluttered spaces, where physical contact with surrounding objects is unavoidable. Traditional safety frameworks treat contact as unsafe, restricting…

Obstacle avoidance between polytopes is a challenging topic for optimal control and optimization-based trajectory planning problems. Existing work either solves this problem through mixed-integer optimization, relying on simplification of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Akshay Thirugnanam , Jun Zeng , Koushil Sreenath

We present a novel method for designing higher-order Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) that guarantee convergence to a safe set within a user-specified finite. Traditional Higher Order CBFs (HOCBFs) ensure asymptotic safety but lack…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-21 Janani S K , Shishir Kolathaya

Recent advances allow for the automation of food preparation in high-throughput environments, yet the successful deployment of these robots requires the planning and execution of quick, robust, and ultimately collision-free behaviors. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Andrew Singletary , William Guffey , Tamas G. Molnar , Ryan Sinnet , Aaron D. Ames

Designing safety-critical controllers for acceleration-controlled unicycle robots is challenging, as control inputs may not appear in the constraints of control Lyapunov functions(CLFs) and control barrier functions (CBFs), leading to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Jihao Huang , Jun Zeng , Xuemin Chi , Koushil Sreenath , Zhitao Liu , Hongye Su

This paper presents a sampled-data framework for the safe navigation of controlled agents in environments cluttered with obstacles governed by uncertain linear dynamics. Collision-free motion is achieved by combining Control Barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-13 Hugo Matias , Daniel Silvestre

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a simple yet effective way for safe control synthesis. Recently, work has been done using differentiable optimization (diffOpt) based methods to systematically construct CBFs for static obstacle…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Bolun Dai , Rooholla Khorrambakht , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Jianye Xu , Chang Che , Bassam Alrifaee

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

Ensuring the safety of dynamical systems is crucial, where collision avoidance is a primary concern. Recently, control barrier functions (CBFs) have emerged as an effective method to integrate safety constraints into control synthesis…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-21 Shiqing Wei , Rooholla Khorrambakht , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Vinicius Mariano Gonçalves , Farshad Khorrami

Safe autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains a critical challenge for robots with limited sensing capabilities. While safety-critical control techniques, such as Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), have been proposed to ensure…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Taekyung Kim , Dimitra Panagou

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Bojan Derajić , Sebastian Bernhard , Wolfgang Hönig

This paper considers collision avoidance for vehicles with first-order nonholonomic constraints maintaining nonzero forward speeds, moving within dynamic environments. We leverage the concept of control barrier functions (CBFs) to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-03 Aurora Haraldsen , Martin S. Wiig , Aaron D. Ames , Kristin Y. Pettersen

In this work, we address the problem of ensuring real-time safety in autonomous robot navigation, in spatially constrained dynamic environments, by utilizing only onboard sensors. We present a real-time control architecture that integrates…

This paper presents a general end-to-end framework for constructing robust and reliable layered safety filters that can be leveraged to perform dynamic collision avoidance over a broad range of applications using only local perception data.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Erina Yamaguchi , Ryan M. Bena , Gilbert Bahati , Aaron D. Ames