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Motivated by the key role of control barrier functions (CBFs) in assessing safety and enabling the synthesis of safe controllers in nonlinear control systems, this paper presents a suite of converse results on CBFs. Given any safe set, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-13 Pol Mestres , Jorge Cortés

Ensuring both performance and safety is critical for autonomous systems operating in real-world environments. While safety filters such as Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) enforce constraints by modifying nominal controllers in real time,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-21 Aditya Singh , Aastha Mishra , Manan Tayal , Shishir Kolathaya , Pushpak Jagtap

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-28 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Shimin Wang , Wei Xiao , Martin Guay

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-08-11 Max Cohen , Calin Belta

This letter presents a new notion of input-to-state safe control barrier functions (ISSf-CBFs), which ensure safety of nonlinear dynamical systems under input disturbances. Similar to how safety conditions are specified in terms of forward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-14 Shishir Kolathaya , Aaron D. Ames

Inverse Constraint Learning (ICL) is the problem of inferring constraints from safe (i.e., constraint-satisfying) demonstrations. The hope is that these inferred constraints can then be used downstream to search for safe policies for new…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Mohamad Qadri , Gokul Swamy , Jonathan Francis , Michael Kaess , Andrea Bajcsy

This paper considers collision avoidance for vehicles with first-order nonholonomic constraints maintaining nonzero forward speeds, moving within dynamic environments. We leverage the concept of control barrier functions (CBFs) to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-03 Aurora Haraldsen , Martin S. Wiig , Aaron D. Ames , Kristin Y. Pettersen

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

Modern autonomous systems, such as flying, legged, and wheeled robots, are generally characterized by high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics, which presents challenges for model-based safety-critical control design. Motivated by the success of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-21 Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Training Neural Networks (NNs) to serve as Barrier Functions (BFs) is a popular way to improve the safety of autonomous dynamical systems. Despite significant practical success, these methods are not generally guaranteed to produce true BFs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Goli Vaisi , James Ferlez , Yasser Shoukry

In this paper, the issue of model uncertainty in safety-critical control is addressed with a data-driven approach. For this purpose, we utilize the structure of an input-ouput linearization controller based on a nominal model along with a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-06-05 Jason Choi , Fernando Castañeda , Claire J. Tomlin , Koushil Sreenath

Regardless of the particular task we want them to perform in an environment, there are often shared safety constraints we want our agents to respect. For example, regardless of whether it is making a sandwich or clearing the table, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Konwoo Kim , Gokul Swamy , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao , Sanjiban Choudhury , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Ensuring the safety of complex dynamical systems often relies on Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability Analysis or Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Both methods require computing a function that characterizes a safe set that can be made…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Jixian Liu , Enrique Mallada

Implementing obstacle avoidance in dynamic environments is a challenging problem for robots. Model predictive control (MPC) is a popular strategy for dealing with this type of problem, and recent work mainly uses control barrier function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Zetao Lu , Kaijun Feng , Jun Xu , Haoyao Chen , Yunjiang Lou

In this paper, we consider the problem of synthesizing a controller in the presence of uncertainty such that the resulting closed-loop system satisfies certain hard constraints while optimizing certain (soft) performance objectives. We…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-10-17 Navid Hashemi , Xin Qin , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Georgios Fainekos , Bardh Hoxha , Danil Prokhorov , Tomoya Yamaguchi

The increasing complexity of control systems necessitates control laws that guarantee safety w.r.t. complex combinations of constraints. In this letter, we propose a framework to describe compositional safety specifications with control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-05 Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

This paper studies the design of controllers that guarantee stability and safety of nonlinear control affine systems with parametric uncertainty in both the drift and control vector fields. To this end, we introduce novel classes of robust…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-12 Max H. Cohen , Calin Belta , Roberto Tron

Learning-based adaptation of Control Barrier Function (CBF) parameters offers a promising path toward safe autonomous navigation that balances conservatism with performance. Yet the accuracy of the underlying safety predictor is ultimately…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-02 Jiachen Li , Shihao Li , Dongmei Chen

Optimal control methods provide solutions to safety-critical problems but easily become intractable. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a popular technique that facilitates their solution by provably guaranteeing safety,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-21 Ehsan Sabouni , H. M. Sabbir Ahmad , Vittorio Giammarino , Christos G. Cassandras , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Wenchao Li

This paper extends control barrier functions (CBFs) to high order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) that can be used for high relative degree constraints. The proposed HOCBFs are more general than recently proposed (exponential) HOCBFs. We…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-03-15 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta