English
Related papers

Related papers: Encoding Material Safety using Control Barrier Fun…

200 papers

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-14 Xuda Ding , Han Wang , Yi Ren , Yu Zheng , Cailian Chen , Jianping He

This paper presents a new approach for guaranteed safety subject to input constraints (e.g., actuator limits) using a composition of multiple control barrier functions (CBFs). First, we present a method for constructing a single CBF from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-10 Pedram Rabiee , Jesse B. Hoagg

Inter-robot collisions pose a significant safety risk when multiple robotic arms operate in close proximity. We present an online collision avoidance methodology leveraging High-Order Control Barrier Functions (HOCBFs) constructed for safe…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Ali Umut Kaypak , Shiqing Wei , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

This paper presents a comprehensive approach for the safety-critical control of robotic manipulators operating in dynamic environments. Building upon the framework of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), we extend the collision cone…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Lucas Almeida

Safe navigation for multi-robot systems requires enforcing safety without sacrificing task efficiency under decentralized decision-making. Existing decentralized methods often assume robot homogeneity, making shared safety requirements…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Joonkyung Kim , Yanze Zhang , Wenhao Luo , Yiwei Lyu

This paper addresses learning safe output feedback control laws from partial observations of expert demonstrations. We assume that a model of the system dynamics and a state estimator are available along with corresponding error bounds,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-04 Lars Lindemann , Alexander Robey , Lejun Jiang , Satyajeet Das , Stephen Tu , Nikolai Matni

To navigate complex environments, robots must increasingly use high-dimensional visual feedback (e.g. images) for control. However, relying on high-dimensional image data to make control decisions raises important questions; particularly,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Mukun Tong , Charles Dawson , Chuchu Fan

Ensuring safety for autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments can be challenging due to factors such as unmodeled dynamics, noisy sensor measurements, and partial observability. To account for these limitations, it is common to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-08 Shaohang Han , Matti Vahs , Jana Tumova

Safety-critical control is a crucial aspect of modern systems, and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have gained popularity as the framework of choice for ensuring safety. However, implementing a CBF requires exact knowledge of the true…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-26 Rahal Nanayakkara , Aaron D. Ames , Paulo Tabuada

Construction automation increasingly requires autonomous mobile robots, yet robust autonomy remains challenging on construction sites. These environments are dynamic and often visually occluded, which complicates perception and navigation.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Johannes Mootz , Reza Akhavian

Motion planning failures during autonomous navigation often occur when safety constraints are either too conservative, leading to deadlocks, or too liberal, resulting in collisions. To improve robustness, a robot must dynamically adapt its…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Nicholas Mohammad , Nicola Bezzo

Ensuring robot safety in complex environments is a difficult task due to actuation limits, such as torque bounds. This paper presents a safety-critical control framework that leverages learning-based switching between multiple backup…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Neil C. Janwani , Ersin Daş , Thomas Touma , Skylar X. Wei , Tamas G. Molnar , Joel W. Burdick

Modern autonomous systems, such as flying, legged, and wheeled robots, are generally characterized by high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics, which presents challenges for model-based safety-critical control design. Motivated by the success of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-21 Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

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

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-14 Yixuan Wang , Simon Sinong Zhan , Ruochen Jiao , Zhilu Wang , Wanxin Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Chao Huang , Qi Zhu

Implementing obstacle avoidance in dynamic environments is a challenging problem for robots. Model predictive control (MPC) is a popular strategy for dealing with this type of problem, and recent work mainly uses control barrier function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Zetao Lu , Kaijun Feng , Jun Xu , Haoyao Chen , Yunjiang Lou

Guaranteeing safety for robotic and autonomous systems in real-world environments is a challenging task that requires the mitigation of stochastic uncertainties. Control barrier functions have, in recent years, been widely used for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-31 Andrew Singletary , Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Aaron D. Ames

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

This paper proposes a safety controller for control-affine nonlinear systems with unmodelled dynamics and disturbances to improve closed-loop robustness. Uncertainty estimation-based control barrier functions (CBFs) are utilized to ensure…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Ersin Daş , Skylar X. Wei , Joel W. Burdick

Set invariance techniques such as control barrier functions (CBFs) can be used to enforce time-varying constraints such as keeping a safe distance from dynamic objects. However, existing methods for enforcing time-varying constraints often…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Yitaek Kim , Christoffer Sloth