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Related papers: Safe Probabilistic Planning for Human-Robot Intera…

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We propose a novel class of risk-aware control barrier functions (RA-CBFs) for the control of stochastic safety-critical systems. Leveraging a result from the stochastic level-crossing literature, we deviate from the martingale theory that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-22 Mitchell Black , Georgios Fainekos , Bardh Hoxha , Danil Prokhorov , Dimitra Panagou

Guaranteeing safety for robotic and autonomous systems in real-world environments is a challenging task that requires the mitigation of stochastic uncertainties. Control barrier functions have, in recent years, been widely used for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-31 Andrew Singletary , Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Aaron D. Ames

This work develops a robust adaptive control strategy for discrete-time systems using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to ensure safety under parametric model uncertainty and disturbances. A key contribution of this work is establishing a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-05 Changrui Liu , Anil Alan , Shengling Shi , Bart De Schutter

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool for enforcing set invariance in safety-critical control systems. While guaranteeing safety, most CBF approaches are myopic in the sense that they solve an optimization problem at…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-08-11 Max Cohen , Calin Belta

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

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

With the increasing complexity of real-world systems and varying environmental uncertainties, it is difficult to build an accurate dynamic model, which poses challenges especially for safety-critical control. In this paper, a learning-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-13 Sihua Zhang , Di-Hua Zhai , Xiaobing Dai , Tzu-yuan Huang , Yuanqing Xia , Sandra Hirche

This paper considers safe control synthesis for dynamical systems with either probabilistic or worst-case uncertainty in both the dynamics model and the safety constraints. We formulate novel probabilistic and robust (worst-case) control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Kehan Long , Vikas Dhiman , Melvin Leok , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

This paper proposes a safety controller for control-affine nonlinear systems with unmodelled dynamics and disturbances to improve closed-loop robustness. Uncertainty estimation-based control barrier functions (CBFs) are utilized to ensure…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Ersin Daş , Skylar X. Wei , Joel W. Burdick

Autonomy advances have enabled robots in diverse environments and close human interaction, necessitating controllers with formal safety guarantees. This paper introduces an experimental platform designed for the validation and demonstration…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Bhavya Giri Goswami , Manan Tayal , Karthik Rajgopal , Pushpak Jagtap , Shishir Kolathaya

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be an effective tool for performing safe control synthesis for nonlinear systems. However, guaranteeing safety in the presence of disturbances and input constraints for high relative degree…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Luzia Knoedler , Oswin So , Ji Yin , Mitchell Black , Zachary Serlin , Panagiotis Tsiotras , Javier Alonso-Mora , Chuchu Fan

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

This paper presents a new approach for guaranteed safety subject to input constraints (e.g., actuator limits) using a composition of multiple control barrier functions (CBFs). First, we present a method for constructing a single CBF from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-10 Pedram Rabiee , Jesse B. Hoagg

Drivers have a responsibility to exercise reasonable care to avoid collision with other road users. This assumed responsibility allows interacting agents to maintain safety without explicit coordination. Thus to enable safe autonomous…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Ryan K. Cosner , Yuxiao Chen , Karen Leung , Marco Pavone

Recently, there has been increasing attention in robot research towards the whole-body collision avoidance. In this paper, we propose a safety-critical controller that utilizes time-varying control barrier functions (time varying CBFs)…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Jihao Huang , Xuemin Chi , Zhitao Liu , 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

Safety-critical motion planning in mixed traffic remains challenging for autonomous vehicles, especially when it involves interactions between the ego vehicle (EV) and surrounding vehicles (SVs). In dense traffic, the feasibility of a lane…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-24 Ying Shuai Quan , Paolo Falcone , Jonas Sjöberg

Safety in terms of collision avoidance for multi-robot systems is a difficult challenge under uncertainty, non-determinism and lack of complete information. This paper aims to propose a collision avoidance method that accounts for both…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Wenhao Luo , Wen Sun , Ashish Kapoor

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have become powerful tools for ensuring safety in nonlinear systems. However, finding valid CBFs that guarantee persistent safety and feasibility remains an open challenge, especially in systems with input…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Taekyung Kim , Robin Inho Kee , Dimitra Panagou

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