English
Related papers

Related papers: Constricting Tubes for Prescribed-Time Safe Contro…

200 papers

This paper addresses the challenge of integrating explicit hard constraints into the control barrier function (CBF) framework for ensuring safety in autonomous systems, including robots. We propose a novel data-driven method to derive CBFs…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Jaemin Lee , Jeeseop Kim , Aaron D. Ames

In many control system applications, state constraint satisfaction needs to be guaranteed within a prescribed time. While this issue has been partially addressed for systems with known dynamics, it remains largely unaddressed for systems…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-14 Tzu-Yuan Huang , Sihua Zhang , Xiaobing Dai , Alexandre Capone , Velimir Todorovski , Stefan Sosnowski , Sandra Hirche

This tutorial paper presents recent work of the authors that extends the theory of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to address practical challenges in the synthesis of safe controllers for autonomous systems and robots. We present novel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-29 Kunal Garg , James Usevitch , Joseph Breeden , Mitchell Black , Devansh Agrawal , Hardik Parwana , Dimitra Panagou

Control barrier function (CBF) has recently started to serve as a basis to develop approaches for enforcing safety requirements in control systems. However, constructing such function for a general system is a non-trivial task. This paper…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Zihao Liang , Jason King Ching Lo

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

We propose new methods to synthesize control barrier function (CBF)-based safe controllers that avoid input saturation, which can cause safety violations. In particular, our method is created for high-dimensional, general nonlinear systems,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Simin Liu , Changliu Liu , John Dolan

In emerging control applications involving multiple and complex tasks, safety filters are gaining prominence as a modular approach to enforcing safety constraints. Among various methods, control barrier functions (CBFs) are widely used for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-12 Jason J. Choi , Claire J. Tomlin , Shankar Sastry , Koushil Sreenath

Industrial control applications require high performance under strict constraints. Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide principled safety mechanisms, but constructing CBF-based safety filters for large-scale systems is challenging. We…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-09 Kim P. Wabersich , Felix Berkel , Felix Gruber , Sven Reimann

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide a powerful framework for ensuring safety in dynamical systems. However, their application typically relies on full state information, which is often violated in real-world due to the availability of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-19 Vaishnavi Jagabathula , Ahan Basu , Pushpak Jagtap

The control barrier function (CBF) has become a fundamental tool in safety-critical systems design since its invention. Typically, the quadratic optimization framework is employed to accommodate CBFs, control Lyapunov functions (CLFs),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Junjun Xie , Liang Hu , Jiahu Qin , Jun Yang , Huijun Gao

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

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

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

Flow-based generative models, such as diffusion models and flow matching models, have achieved remarkable success in learning complex data distributions. However, a critical gap remains for their deployment in safety-critical domains: the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Darshan Gadginmath , Ahmed Allibhoy , Fabio Pasqualetti

Safety filters based on control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular method to guarantee safety for uncertified control policies, e.g., as resulting from reinforcement learning. Here, safety is defined as staying in a pre-defined…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-19 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Mingxuan Che , Angela P. Schoellig

This paper presents a novel approach for synthesizing control barrier functions (CBFs) from high relative degree safety constraints: Rectified CBFs (ReCBFs). We begin by discussing the limitations of existing High-Order CBF approaches and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-06 Pio Ong , Max H. Cohen , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Safety is a fundamental requirement of control systems. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are proposed to ensure the safety of the control system by constructing safety filters or synthesizing control inputs. However, the safety guarantee…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Manan Tayal , Hongchao Zhang , Pushpak Jagtap , Andrew Clark , Shishir Kolathaya

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

This paper investigates the design of a subclass of time-varying Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), specifically that of uniformly time-varying CBFs. Leveraging the fact that CBFs encode a system's dynamic capabilities relative to a state…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-19 Adrian Wiltz , Dimos V. Dimarogonas