Related papers: Designing Barrier Functions for Graceful Safety Co…

Ensuring fairness in the coordination of connected and automated vehicles at intersections is essential for equitable access, social acceptance, and long-term system efficiency, yet it remains underexplored in safety-critical, real-time…

Ensuring constraint satisfaction is a key requirement for safety-critical systems, which include most robotic platforms. For example, constraints can be used for modeling joint position/velocity/torque limits and collision avoidance.…

This paper focuses on safety critical control with sector-bounded uncertainties at the plant input. The uncertainties can represent nonlinear and/or time-varying components. We propose a new robust control barrier function (RCBF) approach…

Uncertainties arising in various control systems, such as robots that are subject to unknown disturbances or environmental variations, pose significant challenges for ensuring system safety, such as collision avoidance. At the same time,…

Failures are challenging for learning to control physical systems since they risk damage, time-consuming resets, and often provide little gradient information. Adding safety constraints to exploration typically requires a lot of prior…

Control barrier functions for port-Hamiltonian systems inherit model uncertainty when the Hamiltonian is learned from data. We show how to propagate this uncertainty into a safety filter with independently tunable credibility budgets. To…

Shared autonomy blends operator intent with autonomous assistance. In cluttered environments, linear blending can produce unsafe commands even when each source is individually collision-free. Many existing approaches model obstacle…

This paper presents a safety-critical control framework to maintain bounded lateral motions for vehicles braking on asymmetric surfaces. We synthesize a brake controller that assists drivers and guarantees safety against excessive lateral…

This paper presents a strategy for control of a spacecraft docking with a non-maneuvering target in the presence of safety constraints and bounded disturbances. The presence of disturbances prevents convergence to a unique docking state, so…

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

In this paper, a method to achieve smooth transitions between sequential reachability tasks for a continuous time mobile robotic system is presented. Control barrier functions provide formal guarantees of forward invariance of safe sets and…

This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordination of robots in dynamic environments. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) with the forward reachable set to guarantee the safe coordination of the robots…

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…

Driven barrier crossings are pervasive in optical-trapping experiments and steered molecular-dynamics simulations. Despite the high fidelity of control, the freedom in the choice of driving protocol is rarely exploited to improve…

This paper proposes a constructive approach to safety control of nonlinear cascade systems subject to multiple state constraints. New design ingredients include a unified characterization of safety and stability for systematic designs of…

This paper presents a trustworthy reinforcement learning approach for the control of industrial compressed air systems. We develop a framework that enables safe and energy-efficient operation under realistic boundary conditions and…

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for developing new robot behaviors. However, typical lack of safety guarantees constitutes a hurdle for its practical application on real robots. To address this issue, safe reinforcement…

Safety-critical control systems, such as spacecraft performing proximity operations, must provide formal safety guarantees despite stochastic uncertainties from state estimation and unmodeled dynamics. Although Control Barrier Functions…

Safety is always the priority in aviation. However, current state-of-the-art passive fault-tolerant control is too conservative to use; current state-of-the-art active fault-tolerant control requires time to perform fault detection and…

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…