Related papers: Encoding Material Safety using Control Barrier Fun…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for developing new robot behaviors. However, typical lack of safety guarantees constitutes a hurdle for its practical application on real robots. To address this issue, safe reinforcement…
Physical human-robot collaboration requires strict safety guarantees since robots and humans work in a shared workspace. This letter presents a novel control framework to handle safety-critical position-based constraints for human-robot…
This paper presents a formal framework for collision avoidance in multi-robot systems, wherein an existing controller is modified in a minimally invasive fashion to ensure safety. We build this framework through the use of control barrier…
Soft robots have been leveraged in considerable areas like surgery, rehabilitation, and bionics due to their softness, flexibility, and safety. However, it is challenging to produce two same soft robots even with the same mold and…
This paper addresses the problem of safety-critical control for systems with unknown dynamics. It has been shown that stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states while optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and…
As autonomous systems become more ubiquitous in daily life, ensuring high performance with guaranteed safety is crucial. However, safety and performance could be competing objectives, which makes their co-optimization difficult.…
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…
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…
With the increasing complexity of real-world systems and varying environmental uncertainties, it is difficult to build an accurate dynamic model, which poses challenges especially for safety-critical control. In this paper, a learning-based…
This paper introduces the notion of an Input Constrained Control Barrier Function (ICCBF), as a method to synthesize safety-critical controllers for non-linear control affine systems with input constraints. The method identifies a subset of…
Humanoid robots are envisioned as general-purpose platforms in human-centered environments, yet their deployment is limited by vulnerability to falls and the risks posed by rigid metal-plastic structures to people and surroundings. We…
This paper studies the problem of utilizing data-driven adaptive control techniques to guarantee stability and safety of uncertain nonlinear systems with high relative degree. We first introduce the notion of a High Order Robust Adaptive…
To bring complex systems into real world environments in a safe manner, they will have to be robust to uncertainties - both in the environment and the system. This paper investigates the safety of control systems under input disturbances,…
Industrial control applications require high performance under strict constraints. Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide principled safety mechanisms, but constructing CBF-based safety filters for large-scale systems is challenging. We…
Ensuring safety for human-interactive robotics is important due to the potential for human injury. The key challenge is defining safety in a way that accounts for the complex range of human behaviors without modeling the human as an…
Safety is a fundamental requirement of many robotic systems. Control barrier function (CBF)-based approaches have been proposed to guarantee the safety of robotic systems. However, the effectiveness of these approaches highly relies on the…
Achieving safe autonomous navigation systems is critical for deploying robots in dynamic and uncertain real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control framework leveraging neural network verification techniques to…
Safety filters based on control barrier functions (CBFs) and high-order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) are often implemented through quadratic programs (QPs). In general, especially in the presence of multiple constraints, feasibility…
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool for enforcing set invariance in safety-critical control systems. While guaranteeing safety, most CBF approaches are myopic in the sense that they solve an optimization problem at…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…