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Reinforcement learning (RL), while powerful and expressive, can often prioritize performance at the expense of safety. Yet safety violations can lead to catastrophic outcomes in real-world deployments. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Lizhi Yang , Blake Werner , Massimiliano de Sa , Aaron D. Ames

This letter addresses the constraint compatibility problem of control barrier functions (CBFs), which occurs when a safety-critical CBF requires a system to apply more control effort than it is capable of generating. This inevitably leads…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-28 Logan E. Beaver

In this article, we propose a control solution for the safe transfer of a quadrotor UAV between two surface robots positioning itself only using the visual features on the surface robots, which enforces safety constraints for precise…

Ensuring robot safety in complex environments is a difficult task due to actuation limits, such as torque bounds. This paper presents a safety-critical control framework that leverages learning-based switching between multiple backup…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Neil C. Janwani , Ersin Daş , Thomas Touma , Skylar X. Wei , Tamas G. Molnar , Joel W. Burdick

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) have emerged as a popular topic in safety critical control due to their ability to provide formal safety guarantees for dynamical systems. Despite their powerful capabilities, the determination of feasible…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-18 Ali Mesbah , Seid H. Pourtakdoust , Alireza Sharifi , Afshin Banazadeh

Safety constraints of nonlinear control systems are commonly enforced through the use of control barrier functions (CBFs). Uncertainties in the dynamic model can disrupt forward invariance guarantees or cause the state to be restricted to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-30 Hannah M. Sweatland , Omkar Sudhir Patil , Warren E. Dixon

Providing safety guarantees for learning-based controllers is important for real-world applications. One approach to realizing safety for arbitrary control policies is safety filtering. If necessary, the filter modifies control inputs to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-18 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Mingxuan Che , Angela P. Schoellig

The problem of dynamic locomotion over rough terrain requires both accurate foot placement together with an emphasis on dynamic stability. Existing approaches to this problem prioritize immediate safe foot placement over longer term dynamic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Ruben Grandia , Andrew J. Taylor , Aaron D. Ames , Marco Hutter

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

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have provided a very versatile framework for the synthesis of safe control architectures for a wide class of nonlinear dynamical systems. Typically, CBF-based synthesis approaches apply to systems that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Shuo Yang , Mitchell Black , Georgios Fainekos , Bardh Hoxha , Hideki Okamoto , Rahul Mangharam

Ensuring safe exploration in high-dimensional systems with unknown dynamics remains a significant challenge. Existing safe reinforcement learning methods often provide safety guarantees only in expectation, which can still lead to safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rahul Narava , Siddharth Verma , Ojas Jain , Shashi Shekhar Jha , Mayank Shekhar Jha

Control Barrier Functions (CBF) are widely used to enforce the safety-critical constraints on nonlinear systems. Recently, these functions are being incorporated into a path planning framework to design safety-critical path planners.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-10-25 Aniketh Manjunath , Quan Nguyen

Planning and control for high-dimensional robot manipulators in cluttered dynamic environments require computational efficiency and robust safety guarantees. Inspired by recent advances in learning configuration-space distance functions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Kehan Long , Ki Myung Brian Lee , Nikola Raicevic , Niyas Attasseri , Melvin Leok , Nikolay Atanasov

Learning-based control has recently shown great efficacy in performing complex tasks for various applications. However, to deploy it in real systems, it is of vital importance to guarantee the system will stay safe. Control Barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-05 Fernando Castañeda , Jason J. Choi , Wonsuhk Jung , Bike Zhang , Claire J. Tomlin , Koushil Sreenath

This paper presents a novel hierarchical, safety-critical control framework that integrates distributed nonlinear model predictive controllers (DNMPCs) with control barrier functions (CBFs) to enable cooperative locomotion of multi-agent…

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

Learning-based approaches for constructing Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are increasingly being explored for safety-critical control systems. However, these methods typically require complete retraining when applied to unseen…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-21 Lakshmideepakreddy Manda , Shaoru Chen , Mahyar Fazlyab

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