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Robust control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a principled mechanism for smooth safety enforcement under worst-case disturbances. However, existing approaches typically rely on explicit, closed-form structure in the dynamics (e.g.,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-16 Donggeon David Oh , Duy P. Nguyen , Haimin Hu , Jaime Fernández Fisac

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

Correct-by-construction techniques, such as control barrier functions (CBFs), can be used to guarantee closed-loop safety by acting as a supervisor of an existing or legacy controller. However, supervisory-control intervention typically…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-05-03 Yuxiao Chen , Ayonga Hereid , Huei Peng , Jessy Grizzle

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been demonstrated as an effective method for safety-critical control of autonomous systems. Although CBFs are simple to deploy, their design remains challenging, motivating the development of…

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) can improve control performance by seeking to learn optimal control policies in the end-use environment for vehicles and other systems. To accomplish this, RL algorithms need to sufficiently explore the state and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-21 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Andrej Ivanco

It has been shown that optimizing quadratic costs while stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states subject to state and control constraints can be reduced to a sequence of Quadratic Programs (QPs) by using Control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-17 Wei Xiao , Christos G. Cassandras , Calin A. Belta

We consider the problem of safely exploring a static and unknown environment while learning valid control barrier functions (CBFs) from sensor data. Existing works either assume known environments, target specific dynamics models, or use…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-03 Paul Lutkus , Deepika Anantharaman , Stephen Tu , Lars Lindemann

This paper addresses the challenge of integrating explicit hard constraints into the control barrier function (CBF) framework for ensuring safety in autonomous systems, including robots. We propose a novel data-driven method to derive CBFs…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Jaemin Lee , Jeeseop Kim , Aaron D. Ames

Breaking safety constraints in control systems can lead to potential risks, resulting in unexpected costs or catastrophic damage. Nevertheless, uncertainty is ubiquitous, even among similar tasks. In this paper, we develop a novel adaptive…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-17 Shengbo Wang , Ke Li , Yin Yang , Yuting Cao , Tingwen Huang , Shiping Wen

The problem of safely learning and controlling a dynamical system - i.e., of stabilizing an originally (partially) unknown system while ensuring that it does not leave a prescribed 'safe set' - has recently received tremendous attention in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-10 Jafar Abbaszadeh Chekan , Cedric Langbort

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

Balancing safety and performance is one of the predominant challenges in modern control system design. Moreover, it is crucial to robustly ensure safety without inducing unnecessary conservativeness that degrades performance. In this work…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Anil Alan , Andrew J. Taylor , Chaozhe R. He , Aaron D. Ames , Gabor Orosz

Ensuring safety in the sense of constraint satisfaction for learning-based control is a critical challenge, especially in the model-free case. While safety filters address this challenge in the model-based setting by modifying unsafe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-15 Kanghui He , Shengling Shi , Ton van den Boom , Bart De Schutter

This paper introduces integral control barrier functions (I-CBFs) as a means to enable the safety-critical integral control of nonlinear systems. Importantly, I-CBFs allow for the holistic encoding of both state constraints and input bounds…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-09 Aaron D. Ames , Gennaro Notomista , Yorai Wardi , Magnus Egerstedt

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 this paper, we consider a way to safely navigate the robots in unknown environments using measurement data from sensory devices. The control barrier function (CBF) is one of the promising approaches to encode safety requirements of the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-11 Wataru Hashimoto , Kazumune Hashimoto , Akifumi Wachi , Xun Shen , Masako Kishida , Shigemasa Takai

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) that provide formal safety guarantees have been widely used for safety-critical systems. However, it is non-trivial to design a CBF. Utilizing neural networks as CBFs has shown great success, but it…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-20 Xinyu Wang , Luzia Knoedler , Frederik Baymler Mathiesen , Javier Alonso-Mora

Learning-based methods for constructing control barrier functions (CBFs) are gaining popularity for ensuring safe robot control. A major limitation of existing methods is their reliance on extensive sampling over the state space or online…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-17 Hongzhan Yu , Seth Farrell , Ryo Yoshimitsu , Zhizhen Qin , Henrik I. Christensen , Sicun Gao

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 addresses the target-pursuit problem, aiming to ensure each pursuer's safety regarding collision avoidance, sensing range, and input saturation. An input-constrained CBF is proposed to dynamically regulate the pursuer's control,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-11 Yaosheng Deng , Junjie Gao , Jiaping Xiao , Mir Feroskhan