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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

Safe operation of multi-robot systems is critical, especially in communication-degraded environments such as underwater for seabed mapping, underground caves for navigation, and in extraterrestrial missions for assembly and construction. We…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Luca Ballotta , Rajat Talak

The need for robust control laws is especially important in safety-critical applications. We propose robust hybrid control barrier functions as a means to synthesize control laws that ensure robust safety. Based on this notion, we formulate…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-05-14 Alexander Robey , Lars Lindemann , Stephen Tu , Nikolai Matni

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

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

This paper introduces a novel safety-critical control method through the synthesis of control barrier functions (CBFs) for systems with high-relative-degree safety constraints. By extending the procedure of CBF backstepping, we propose…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2025-08-29 Laszlo Gacsi , Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar

This work combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with a whole-body controller to enable self-collision avoidance for the MIT Humanoid. Existing reactive controllers for self-collision avoidance cannot guarantee collision-free…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Charles Khazoom , Daniel Gonzalez-Diaz , Yanran Ding , Sangbae Kim

To navigate complex environments, robots must increasingly use high-dimensional visual feedback (e.g. images) for control. However, relying on high-dimensional image data to make control decisions raises important questions; particularly,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Mukun Tong , Charles Dawson , Chuchu Fan

This paper presents conditions for ensuring forward invariance of safe sets under sampled-data system dynamics with piecewise-constant controllers and fixed time-steps. First, we introduce two different metrics to compare the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-28 Joseph Breeden , Kunal Garg , Dimitra Panagou

Complex control systems are often described in a layered fashion, represented as higher-order systems where the inputs appear after a chain of integrators. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be powerful tools for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-05 Andrew J. Taylor , Pio Ong , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

In this paper, we study a safe control design for dynamical systems in the presence of uncertainty in a dynamical environment. The worst-case error approach is considered to formulate robust Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Vahid Hamdipoor , Nader Meskin , Christos G. Cassandras

When deploying autonomous agents in unstructured environments over sustained periods of time, adaptability and robustness oftentimes outweigh optimality as a primary consideration. In other words, safety and survivability constraints play a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-08 Motoya Ohnishi , Gennaro Notomista , Masashi Sugiyama , Magnus Egerstedt

In this paper we present a framework that allows the motion control of a robotic arm automatically handling different kinds of safety-related tasks. The developed controller is based on a Task-Priority Inverse Kinematics algorithm that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Paolo Di Lillo , Filippo Arrichiello , Gianluca Antonelli , Stefano Chiaverini

A safe controller for multicopter is proposed using control barrier function. Multicopter dynamics are reformulated to deal with mixed-relative-degree and non-strict-feedback-form dynamics, and a time-varying safe backstepping controller is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-09 Jinrae Kim , Youdan Kim

Barrier functions (BFs) characterize safe sets of dynamical systems, where hard constraints are never violated as the system evolves over time. Computing a valid safe set and BF for a nonlinear (and potentially unmodeled), non-autonomous…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-26 Amy K. Strong , Ali Kashani , Claus Danielson , Leila Bridgeman

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 functions provide a powerful means for synthesizing safety filters that ensure safety framed as forward set invariance. Key to CBFs' effectiveness is the simple inequality on the system dynamics: $\dot{h} \geq - \alpha(h)$.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-18 Pio Ong , Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Safe navigation for multi-robot systems requires enforcing safety without sacrificing task efficiency under decentralized decision-making. Existing decentralized methods often assume robot homogeneity, making shared safety requirements…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Joonkyung Kim , Yanze Zhang , Wenhao Luo , Yiwei Lyu

Robots deployed in unstructured, real-world environments operate under considerable uncertainty due to imperfect state estimates, model error, and disturbances. Given this real-world context, the goal of this paper is to develop controllers…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-27 Ryan K. Cosner , Preston Culbertson , Andrew J. Taylor , Aaron D. Ames

We present an approach to ensure safe and deadlock-free navigation for decentralized multi-robot systems operating in constrained environments, including doorways and intersections. Although many solutions have been proposed that ensure…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Rohan Chandra , Vrushabh Zinage , Efstathios Bakolas , Peter Stone , Joydeep Biswas