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Safe autonomy is a critical requirement and a key enabler for robots to operate safely in unstructured complex environments. Control barrier functions and safe motion corridors are two widely used but technically distinct safety methods,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Ömür Arslan , Nikolay Atanasov

Physical human-robot interaction offers the potential to leverage human intelligence and robot physical capabilities to enable a range of exciting applications, e.g., collaborative robots for rehabilitation. Safety is critical for the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rui Luo , Jonas Mariager Jakobsen , Wesley Roozing , Federico Califano , Cheng Fang

Bringing dynamic robots into the wild requires a tenuous balance between performance and safety. Yet controllers designed to provide robust safety guarantees often result in conservative behavior, and tuning these controllers to find the…

Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to develop feedback controllers that endow systems with properties such as safety and stability. The guarantees ensured by these controllers often rely on accurate estimates of the system state for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-02 Sarah Dean , Andrew J. Taylor , Ryan K. Cosner , Benjamin Recht , Aaron D. Ames

Although soft robots show safer interactions with their environment than traditional robots, soft mechanisms and actuators still have significant potential for damage or degradation particularly during unmodeled contact. This article…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-03 Andrew P. Sabelhaus , Zach J. Patterson , Anthony T. Wertz , Carmel Majidi

This paper studies the problem of safe control of sampled-data systems under bounded disturbance and measurement errors with piecewise-constant controllers. To achieve this, we first propose the High-Order Doubly Robust Control Barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-18 Pradeep Sharma Oruganti , Parinaz Naghizadeh , Qadeer Ahmed

Safe navigation of autonomous robots remains one of the core challenges in the field, especially in dynamic and uncertain environments. One of the prevalent approaches is safety filtering based on control barrier functions (CBFs), which are…

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have been used to enforce safety and task specifications expressed in Signal Temporal Logic (STL). However, existing CBF-STL approaches typically rely on fixed hyperparameters and per-step optimization,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-29 Wenliang Liu , Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…

The increasing complexity of modern robotic systems and the environments they operate in necessitates the formal consideration of safety in the presence of imperfect measurements. In this paper we propose a rigorous framework for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-30 Ryan K. Cosner , Andrew W. Singletary , Andrew J. Taylor , Tamas G. Molnar , Katherine L. Bouman , Aaron D. Ames

Obstacle avoidance is central to safe navigation, especially for robots with arbitrary and nonconvex geometries operating in cluttered environments. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) approaches often rely on analytic clearance…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shuo Liu , Zhe Huang , Calin A. Belta

Hybrid dynamical systems are ubiquitous as practical robotic applications often involve both continuous states and discrete switchings. Safety is a primary concern for hybrid robotic systems. Existing safety-critical control approaches for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Shuo Yang , Yu Chen , Xiang Yin , George J. Pappas , Rahul Mangharam

In advanced manufacturing, strict safety guarantees are required to allow humans and robots to work together in a shared workspace. One of the challenges in this application field is the variety and unpredictability of human behavior,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Dianhao Zhang , Mien Van , Stephen Mcllvanna , Yuzhu Sun , Seán McLoone

The control barrier function (CBF) has become a fundamental tool in safety-critical systems design since its invention. Typically, the quadratic optimization framework is employed to accommodate CBFs, control Lyapunov functions (CLFs),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Junjun Xie , Liang Hu , Jiahu Qin , Jun Yang , Huijun Gao

Safe operation is essential for deploying robots in human-centered 3D environments. Soft continuum manipulators provide passive safety through mechanical compliance, but still require active control to achieve reliable collision avoidance.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Kiwan Wong , Maximillian Stölzle , Wei Xiao , Daniela Rus

Ensuring safety is of paramount importance in physical human-robot interaction applications. This requires both adherence to safety constraints defined on the system state, as well as guaranteeing compliant behavior of the robot. If the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-17 Armin Lederer , Azra Begzadić , Neha Das , Sandra Hirche

Designing controllers that accomplish tasks while guaranteeing safety constraints remains a significant challenge. We often want an agent to perform well in a nominal task, such as environment exploration, while ensuring it can avoid unsafe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-04 Azra Begzadić , Nikhil Uday Shinde , Sander Tonkens , Dylan Hirsch , Kaleb Ugalde , Michael C. Yip , Jorge Cortés , Sylvia Herbert

We propose new methods to synthesize control barrier function (CBF)-based safe controllers that avoid input saturation, which can cause safety violations. In particular, our method is created for high-dimensional, general nonlinear systems,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Simin Liu , Changliu Liu , John Dolan

In safety-critical control systems, ensuring both safety and feasibility under sampled-data implementations is crucial for practical deployment. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) frameworks, such as High-Order CBFs (HOCBFs),…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-09 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-01 Renjie Ma , Ziyao Qu , Zhijian Hu , Dong Zhao , Marios M. Polycarpou