English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning to Nudge: A Scalable Barrier Function Fra…

200 papers

This paper addresses the challenge of safe navigation for rigid-body mobile robots in dynamic environments. We introduce an analytic approach to compute the distance between a polygon and an ellipse, and employ it to construct a control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Kehan Long , Khoa Tran , Melvin Leok , Nikolay Atanasov

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool to enforce safety of a control system. CBFs are commonly utilized in a quadratic program formulation (CBF-QP) as safety-critical constraints. A class $\mathcal{K}$ function in CBFs…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-12 Hengbo Ma , Bike Zhang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Koushil Sreenath

Safe navigation in real-time is an essential task for humanoid robots in real-world deployment. Since humanoid robots are inherently underactuated thanks to unilateral ground contacts, a path is considered safe if it is obstacle-free and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Chengyang Peng , Victor Paredes , Guillermo A. Castillo , Ayonga Hereid

Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Saif Sidhik , Mohan Sridharan , Dirk Ruiken

Construction automation increasingly requires autonomous mobile robots, yet robust autonomy remains challenging on construction sites. These environments are dynamic and often visually occluded, which complicates perception and navigation.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Johannes Mootz , Reza Akhavian

We introduce a novel method for mobile robot navigation in dynamic, unknown environments, leveraging onboard sensing and distributionally robust optimization to impose probabilistic safety constraints. Our method introduces a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Kehan Long , Yinzhuang Yi , Zhirui Dai , Sylvia Herbert , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) with assured satisfaction of hard state constraints during training has recently received a lot of attention. Safety filters, e.g., based on control barrier functions (CBFs), provide a promising way for safe…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Yikun Cheng , Pan Zhao , Naira Hovakimyan

Developing a safe and efficient collision avoidance policy for multiple robots is challenging in the decentralized scenarios where each robot generate its paths without observing other robots' states and intents. While other distributed…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Pinxin Long , Tingxiang Fan , Xinyi Liao , Wenxi Liu , Hao Zhang , Jia Pan

Collision avoidance is a widely investigated topic in robotic applications. When applying collision avoidance techniques to a mobile robot, how to deal with the spatial structure of the robot still remains a challenge. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Fan Ding , Han Wang , Jianping He , Yi Ren , Yu Zheng

Robotic grasping in densely cluttered environments is challenging due to scarce collision-free grasp affordances. Non-prehensile actions can increase feasible grasps in cluttered environments, but most research focuses on single-arm rather…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Yongliang Wang , Hamidreza Kasaei

As autonomous systems become increasingly prevalent in daily life, ensuring their safety is paramount. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as an effective tool for guaranteeing safety; however, manually designing them for specific…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Shreenabh Agrawal , Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya

Safety-critical motion planning in mixed traffic remains challenging for autonomous vehicles, especially when it involves interactions between the ego vehicle (EV) and surrounding vehicles (SVs). In dense traffic, the feasibility of a lane…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-24 Ying Shuai Quan , Paolo Falcone , Jonas Sjöberg

Ensuring operational safety is critical for human-to-humanoid motion imitation. This paper presents a vision-based framework that enables a humanoid robot to imitate human movements while avoiding collisions. Human skeletal keypoints are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Wenqi Cai , John Abanes , Nikolaos Evangeliou , Anthony Tzes

Safe control in unknown environments is a significant challenge in robotics. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are widely used to guarantee system safety, they often assume known environments with predefined obstacles. The proposed…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Golnaz Raja , Teemu Mökkönen , Reza Ghabcheloo

Drivers have a responsibility to exercise reasonable care to avoid collision with other road users. This assumed responsibility allows interacting agents to maintain safety without explicit coordination. Thus to enable safe autonomous…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Ryan K. Cosner , Yuxiao Chen , Karen Leung , Marco Pavone

This paper presents an efficient and safe method to avoid static and dynamic obstacles based on LiDAR. First, point cloud is used to generate a real-time local grid map for obstacle detection. Then, obstacles are clustered by DBSCAN…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Zhuozhu Jian , Zihong Yan , Xuanang Lei , Zihong Lu , Bin Lan , Xueqian Wang , Bin Liang

Decentralized control schemes are increasingly favored in various domains that involve multi-agent systems due to the need for computational efficiency as well as general applicability to large-scale systems. However, in the absence of an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Yiwei Lyu , Wenhao Luo , John M. Dolan

Multi-robot systems (MRS) are essential for large-scale applications such as disaster response, material transport, and warehouse logistics, yet ensuring robust, safety-aware formation control in cluttered and dynamic environments remains a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Qintong Xie , Weishu Zhan , Peter Chin

Contact-rich tasks pose significant challenges for robotic systems due to inherent uncertainty, complex dynamics, and the high risk of damage during interaction. Recent advances in learning-based control have shown great potential in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Heng Zhang , Rui Dai , Gokhan Solak , Pokuang Zhou , Yu She , Arash Ajoudani

In this paper, we focus on non-conservative collision avoidance between robots and obstacles with control affine dynamics and convex shapes. System safety is defined using the minimum distance between the safe regions associated with robots…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Akshay Thirugnanam , Jun Zeng , Koushil Sreenath