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Related papers: Perception-Limited Smooth Safety Filtering

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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

The control barrier function (CBF) has become a fundamental tool in safety-critical systems design since its invention. Typically, the quadratic optimization framework is employed to accommodate CBFs, control Lyapunov functions (CLFs),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Junjun Xie , Liang Hu , Jiahu Qin , Jun Yang , Huijun Gao

Learning-based control approaches have shown great promise in performing complex tasks directly from high-dimensional perception data for real robotic systems. Nonetheless, the learned controllers can behave unexpectedly if the trajectories…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Fernando Castañeda , Haruki Nishimura , Rowan McAllister , Koushil Sreenath , Adrien Gaidon

This paper proposes a safety-critical controller for dynamic and uncertain environments, leveraging a robust environment control barrier function (ECBF) to enhance the robustness against the measurement and prediction uncertainties…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-21 Ying Shuai Quan , Jian Zhou , Erik Frisk , Chung Choo Chung

Ensuring safety in autonomous systems requires controllers that aim to satisfy state-wise constraints without relying on online interaction.While existing Safe Offline RL methods typically enforce soft expected-cost constraints, they…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Mumuksh Tayal , Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya , Ravi Prakash

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic systems requires policies that improve task performance while satisfying state and input constraints during both training and deployment. Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a principled…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dhruv S. Kushwaha , Zoleikha A. Biron

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

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

In this paper, we propose a safety-critical controller based on time-varying control barrier functions (CBFs) for a robot with an unicycle model in the continuous-time domain to achieve navigation and dynamic collision avoidance. Unlike…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Jihao Huang , Zhitao Liu , Jun Zeng , Xuemin Chi , Hongye Su

In this paper, we propose a novel Control Barrier Function (CBF) based controller for nonlinear systems with complex, time-varying input constraints. To deal with these constraints, we introduce an auxiliary control input to transform the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-20 Yaosheng Deng , Yang Bai , Yujie Wang , Masaki Ogura , Mir Feroskhan

Guaranteeing safety for robotic and autonomous systems in real-world environments is a challenging task that requires the mitigation of stochastic uncertainties. Control barrier functions have, in recent years, been widely used for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-31 Andrew Singletary , Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Aaron D. Ames

In this work, we consider the problem of designing a safety filter for a nonlinear uncertain control system. Our goal is to augment an arbitrary controller with a safety filter such that the overall closed-loop system is guaranteed to stay…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Angela P. Schoellig

Autonomous navigation through unstructured and dynamically-changing environments is a complex task that continues to present many challenges for modern roboticists. In particular, legged robots typically possess manipulable asymmetric…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Ryan M. Bena , Gilbert Bahati , Blake Werner , Ryan K. Cosner , Lizhi Yang , Aaron D. Ames

We present verifiable conditions for synthesizing a single smooth Lyapunov function that certifies both asymptotic stability and safety under bounded controls. These sufficient conditions ensure the strict compatibility of a control barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-14 Jun Liu

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are utilized to ensure the safety of control systems. CBFs act as safety filters in order to provide safety guarantees without compromising system performance. These safety guarantees rely on the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-30 Hongchao Zhang , Manan Tayal , Jackson Cox , Pushpak Jagtap , Shishir Kolathaya , Andrew Clark

Safety has been a critical issue for the deployment of learning-based approaches in real-world applications. To address this issue, control barrier function (CBF) and its variants have attracted extensive attention for safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-08 Alaa Eddine Chriat , Chuangchuang Sun

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have seen widespread success in providing forward invariance and safety guarantees for dynamical control systems. A crucial limitation of discrete-time formulations is that CBFs that are nonconcave in their…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-14 James Usevitch , Juan Augusto Paredes Salazar , Ankit Goel

We study the problem of co-designing control barrier functions (CBF) and linear state feedback controllers for continuous-time linear systems. We achieve this by means of a single semi-definite optimization program. Our formulation can…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-19 Han Wang , Kostas Margellos , Antonis Papachristodoulou , Claudio De Persis

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

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