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Related papers: Refining Almost-Safe Value Functions on the Fly

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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

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

Safe real-time control of robotic manipulators in unstructured environments requires handling numerous safety constraints without compromising task performance. Traditional approaches, such as artificial potential fields (APFs), suffer from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Daniel Morton , Marco Pavone

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled vast performance improvements for robotics systems. To achieve these results though, the agent often must randomly explore the environment, which for safety critical systems presents a significant…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Eric Squires , Phillip Odom , Zsolt Kira

This paper addresses the problem of safety-critical control for systems with unknown dynamics. It has been shown that stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states while optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-31 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

We present a framework to \emph{certify} Hamilton--Jacobi (HJ) reachability learned by reinforcement learning (RL). Building on a discounted initial time \emph{travel-cost} formulation that makes small-step RL value iteration provably…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-19 Prashant Solanki , Isabelle El-Hajj , Jasper J. van Beers , Erik-Jan van Kampen , Coen C. de Visser

Ensuring safe behavior is critical for modern autonomous cyber-physical systems. Control barrier functions (CBFs) are widely used to enforce safety in autonomous systems, yet their placement within networked control architectures remains…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Severin Beger , Yuling Chen , Sandra Hirche

Control barrier functions (CBFs) offer an efficient framework for designing real-time safe controllers. However, CBF-based controllers can be short-sighted, resulting in poor performance, a behaviour which is aggravated in uncertain…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-16 Allan Andre do Nascimento , Antonis Papachristodoulou , Kostas Margellos

Physical human-robot interaction offers the potential to leverage human intelligence and robot physical capabilities to enable a range of exciting applications, e.g., collaborative robots for rehabilitation. Safety is critical for the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rui Luo , Jonas Mariager Jakobsen , Wesley Roozing , Federico Califano , Cheng Fang

Recent work has shown that stabilizing an affine control system while optimizing a quadratic cost subject to state and control constraints can be mapped to a sequence of Quadratic Programs (QPs) using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-26 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

Autonomous robots commonly aim to complete a nominal behavior while minimizing a cost; this leaves them vulnerable to failure or unplanned scenarios, where a backup or contingency plan to a safe set is needed to avoid a total mission…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Raj Harshit Srirangam , Leonard Jung , Rohith Poola , Michael Everett

Safety has been of paramount importance in motion planning and control techniques and is an active area of research in the past few years. Most safety research for mobile robots target at maintaining safety with the notion of collision…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Manas Gupta , Xuesu Xiao

Adaptive control has focused on online control of dynamic systems in the presence of parametric uncertainties, with solutions guaranteeing stability and control performance. Safety, a related property to stability, is becoming increasingly…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-12 Johannes Autenrieb , Anuradha M. Annaswamy

We study the problem of verification and synthesis of robust control barrier functions (CBF) for control-affine polynomial systems with bounded additive uncertainty and convex polynomial constraints on the control. We first formulate robust…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-25 Shucheng Kang , Yuxiao Chen , Heng Yang , Marco Pavone

This article introduces the Pareto Control Barrier Function (PCBF) algorithm to maximize the inner safe set of dynamical systems under input constraints. Traditional Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) ensure safety by maintaining system…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-21 Xiaoyang Cao , Zhe Fu , Alexandre M. Bayen

Safety filters based on control barrier functions (CBFs) and high-order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) are often implemented through quadratic programs (QPs). In general, especially in the presence of multiple constraints, feasibility…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-07 Shima Sadat Mousavi , Max H. Cohen , Pol Mestres , Aaron D. Ames

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are a popular approach for safe control of nonlinear systems. In CBF-based control, the desired safety properties of the system are mapped to nonnegativity of a CBF, and the control input is chosen to ensure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Hongchao Zhang , Junlin Wu , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik , Andrew Clark

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

In this paper, we propose a hybrid MPC local planner that uses a learning-based approximation of a time-varying safe set, derived from local observations and applied as the MPC terminal constraint. This set can be represented as a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Bojan Derajić , Mohamed-Khalil Bouzidi , Sebastian Bernhard , Wolfgang Hönig