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Related papers: Distributed Control Barrier Functions for Safe Mul…

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Safety filters based on control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular method to guarantee safety for uncertified control policies, e.g., as resulting from reinforcement learning. Here, safety is defined as staying in a pre-defined…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-19 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Mingxuan Che , Angela P. Schoellig

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 new class of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) that help avoid collisions with kinematic (non-zero velocity) obstacles. While the current forms of CBFs have been successful in…

Control barrier function (CBF)-based methods provide the minimum modification necessary to formally guarantee safety in the context of quadratic programming, and strict safety guarantee for safety critical systems. However, most CBF-related…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-27 Xiaoxiao Li , Zhirui Sun , Hongpeng Wang , Shuai Li , Jiankun Wang

This paper proposes a distributed controller synthesis framework for safe navigation of multi-agent systems. We leverage control barrier functions to formulate collision avoidance with obstacles and teammates as constraints on the control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-03 Pol Mestres , Carlos Nieto-Granda , Jorge Cortés

Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to endow systems with properties of stability and safety, and have been deployed successfully in multiple domains. Despite this success, model uncertainty remains a significant challenge in synthesizing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-12-24 Andrew Taylor , Andrew Singletary , Yisong Yue , Aaron Ames

Autonomous robot navigation can be particularly demanding, especially when the surrounding environment is not known and safety of the robot is crucial. This work relates to the synthesis of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) through data for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Marvin Harms , Mihir Kulkarni , Nikhil Khedekar , Martin Jacquet , Kostas Alexis

We consider the problem of designing distributed collision-avoidance multi-agent control in large-scale environments with potentially moving obstacles, where a large number of agents are required to maintain safety using only local…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-23 Songyuan Zhang , Kunal Garg , Chuchu Fan

We consider safety-critical multi-agent systems with distributed control architectures and potentially varying network topologies. While learning-based distributed control enables scalability and high performance, a lack of formal safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Jonas Ohnemus , Alexandre Didier , Ahmed Aboudonia , Andrea Carron , Melanie N. Zeilinger

The capability to navigate safely in an unstructured environment is crucial when deploying robotic systems in real-world scenarios. Recently, control barrier function (CBF) based approaches have been highly effective in synthesizing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Bolun Dai , Rooholla Khorrambakht , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are a powerful tool for ensuring the safety of autonomous systems, yet applying them to nonholonomic robots in cluttered, dynamic environments remains an open challenge. State-of-the-art methods often rely…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Hun Kuk Park , Taekyung Kim , Dimitra Panagou

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a powerful tool in the design of safety-critical controllers for nonlinear systems. In modern applications, complex systems often involve the feedback interconnection of subsystems evolving…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Stefano Di Gregorio , Guido Carnevale , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Using control barrier functions (CBFs) as safety filters provides a computationally inexpensive yet effective method for constructing controllers in safety-critical applications. However, using CBFs requires the construction of a valid CBF,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Bolun Dai , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordinated control of cooperative robots locomoting in the presence of fixed (holonomic) constraints. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) to ensure the safe…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Jeeseop Kim , Jaemin Lee , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have recently been introduced as a systematic tool to ensure safety by establishing set invariance. When combined with a control Lyapunov function (CLF), they form a safety-critical control mechanism.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-22 Mohammad Aali , Jun Liu

In this paper, we present a novel probabilistic safe control framework for human-robot interaction that combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with conformal risk control to provide formal safety guarantees while considering complex…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Jake Gonzales , Kazuki Mizuta , Karen Leung , Lillian J. Ratliff

Applications that require multi-robot systems to operate independently for extended periods of time in unknown or unstructured environments face a broad set of challenges, such as hardware degradation, changing weather patterns, or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-16 Yousef Emam , Paul Glotfelter , Sean Wilson , Gennaro Notomista , Magnus Egerstedt

Designing safety-critical control for robotic manipulators is challenging, especially in a cluttered environment. First, the actual trajectory of a manipulator might deviate from the planned one due to the complex collision environments and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-14 Xuda Ding , Han Wang , Yi Ren , Yu Zheng , Cailian Chen , Jianping He