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Safety-critical control tasks with high levels of uncertainty are becoming increasingly common. Typically, techniques that guarantee safety during learning and control utilize constraint-based safety certificates, which can be leveraged to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-07 Alexandre Capone , Ryan Cosner , Aaron Ames , Sandra Hirche

Control Barrier Functions offer safety certificates by dictating controllers that enforce safety constraints. However, their response depends on the classK function that is used to restrict the rate of change of the value of the barrier…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-25 Hardik Parwana , Dimitra Panagou

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

Latent safety filters extend Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability to operate on latent state representations and dynamics learned directly from high-dimensional observations, enabling safe visuomotor control under hard-to-model constraints.…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in various robotics applications, yet its deployment on real systems is still limited due to safety and operational constraints. The safe RL field has gained considerable attention in recent…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Sadık Bera Yüksel , Ali Tevfik Buyukkocak , Derya Aksaray

In the field of control engineering, the connection between Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and time-varying Control Barrier Functions (CBF) has attracted considerable attention. CBFs have demonstrated notable success in ensuring the safety of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Andrea Ruo , Lorenzo Sabattini , Valeria Villani

Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-26 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in addressing complex robotic challenges. In real-world applications, RL is often accompanied by failsafe controllers as a last resort to avoid catastrophic events. While necessary for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Jakob Thumm , Guillaume Pelat , Matthias Althoff

Control barrier function (CBF) has recently started to serve as a basis to develop approaches for enforcing safety requirements in control systems. However, constructing such function for a general system is a non-trivial task. This paper…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Zihao Liang , Jason King Ching Lo

AI systems empowered by reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms harbor the immense potential to catalyze societal advancement, yet their deployment is often impeded by significant safety concerns. Particularly in safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Jiaming Ji , Jiayi Zhou , Borong Zhang , Juntao Dai , Xuehai Pan , Ruiyang Sun , Weidong Huang , Yiran Geng , Mickel Liu , Yaodong Yang

We propose a learning-based Control Barrier Function (CBF) to reduce conservatism in collision avoidance for car-like robots. Traditional CBFs often use the Euclidean distance between robots' centers as a safety margin, which neglects their…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Jianye Xu , Bassam Alrifaee

Safety is an essential component for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world scenarios, and is critical during the learning process itself. A natural first approach toward safe RL is to manually specify constraints on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Krishnan Srinivasan , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sehoon Ha , Jie Tan , Chelsea Finn

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-29 Kunal Garg , James Usevitch , Joseph Breeden , Mitchell Black , Devansh Agrawal , Hardik Parwana , Dimitra Panagou

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essentially a trial-and-error learning procedure which may cause unsafe behavior during the exploration-and-exploitation process. This hinders the application of RL to real-world control problems, especially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Yutong Li , Nan Li , H. Eric Tseng , Anouck Girard , Dimitar Filev , Ilya Kolmanovsky

Ensuring safety for black-box hybrid dynamical systems presents significant challenges due to their instantaneous state jumps and unknown explicit nonlinear dynamics. Existing solutions for strict safety constraint satisfaction, like…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Aayushi Shrivastava , Kartik Nagpal , Sairam Jinkala , Jean-Baptiste Bouvier , Negar Mehr

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the de facto method for achieving locomotion on humanoid robots in practice, yet stability analysis of the corresponding control policies is lacking. Recent work has attempted to merge control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-07 Zachary Olkin , William D. Compton , Aaron D. Ames

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

Safety-critical robot systems need thorough testing to expose design flaws and software bugs which could endanger humans. Testing in simulation is becoming increasingly popular, as it can be applied early in the development process and does…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and continuous nonlinear control have been successfully deployed in multiple domains of complicated sequential decision-making tasks. However, given the exploration nature of the learning process and the presence…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Wenhao Luo , Wen Sun , Ashish Kapoor