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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

Learning-based controllers, such as neural network (NN) controllers, can show high empirical performance but lack formal safety guarantees. To address this issue, control barrier functions (CBFs) have been applied as a safety filter to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-10 Shuo Yang , Shaoru Chen , Victor M. Preciado , Rahul Mangharam

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are becoming popular tools in guaranteeing safety for nonlinear systems and constraints, and they can reduce a constrained optimal control problem into a sequence of Quadratic Programs (QPs) for affine…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Wei Xiao , Christos G. Cassandras , Calin A. Belta , Daniela Rus

Dynamic obstacle avoidance is a challenging topic for optimal control and optimization-based trajectory planning problems. Many existing works use Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to enforce safety constraints for control systems. CBFs are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Shuo Liu , Yihui Mao , Calin A. Belta

In this paper, we show that under mild controllability assumptions a time-invariant Control Barrier Function (CBF) can be constructed based on predictions with a finite horizon. As a starting point, we require only a known subset of a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-20 Adrian Wiltz , Xiao Tan , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

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

We consider safety-critical multi-agent systems with distributed control architectures and potentially varying network topologies. While learning-based distributed control enables scalability and high performance, a lack of formal safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Jonas Ohnemus , Alexandre Didier , Ahmed Aboudonia , Andrea Carron , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Safety critical systems involve the tight coupling between potentially conflicting control objectives and safety constraints. As a means of creating a formal framework for controlling systems of this form, and with a view toward automotive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-27 Aaron D. Ames , Xiangru Xu , Jessy W. Grizzle , Paulo Tabuada

Safety is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. Recently, one-step or multi-step optimal control problems for discrete-time nonlinear dynamical system were formulated to offer tracking stability using control Lyapunov functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-04 Jun Zeng , Zhongyu Li , Koushil Sreenath

Ensuring safe exploration in high-dimensional systems with unknown dynamics remains a significant challenge. Existing safe reinforcement learning methods often provide safety guarantees only in expectation, which can still lead to safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rahul Narava , Siddharth Verma , Ojas Jain , Shashi Shekhar Jha , Mayank Shekhar Jha

We consider the problem of designing controllers to guarantee safety in a class of nonlinear systems under uncertainties in the system dynamics and/or the environment. We define a class of uncertain control barrier functions (CBFs), and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-20 Vipul K. Sharma , S. Sivaranjani

Recent literature has proposed approaches that learn control policies with high performance while maintaining safety guarantees. Synthesizing Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachable sets has become an effective tool for verifying safety and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-23 Milan Ganai , Sicun Gao , Sylvia Herbert

In leader-follower consensus, strong r-robustness of the communication graph provides a sufficient condition for followers to achieve consensus in the presence of misbehaving agents. Previous studies have assumed that robots can form and/or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Haejoon Lee , Dimitra Panagou

This paper presents a systematic method for synthesizing a Control Barrier Function (CBF) that encodes predictive information into a CBF. Unlike other methods, the synthesized CBF can account for changes and time-variations in the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-23 Adrian Wiltz , Dimos V. Dimarogonas

This paper generalizes the control barrier function framework by replacing scalar-valued functions with matrix-valued ones. Specifically, we develop barrier conditions for safe sets defined by matrix inequalities -- both semidefinite and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-01 Pio Ong , Yicheng Xu , Ryan M. Bena , Faryar Jabbari , Aaron D. Ames

Recent learning-based safety filters have outperformed conventional methods, such as hand-crafted Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), by effectively adapting to complex constraints. However, these learning-based approaches lack formal safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Jiaxing Li , Hanjiang Hu , Yujie Yang , Changliu Liu

As modern systems become ever more connected with complex dynamic coupling relationships, developing safe control methods becomes paramount. In this paper, we discuss the relationship of node-level safety definitions for individual agents…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-16 Brooks A. Butler , Philip E. Paré

In this paper, we study a safe control design for dynamical systems in the presence of uncertainty in a dynamical environment. The worst-case error approach is considered to formulate robust Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Vahid Hamdipoor , Nader Meskin , Christos G. Cassandras

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-31 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a theoretical foundation for safety-critical control in robotic systems. However, most existing methods rely on explicit analytical expressions of unsafe state regions, which are often impractical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Songqiao Hu , Zidong Wang , Zeyi Liu , Zhen Shen , Xiao He