Related papers: Response-Aware Risk-Constrained Control Barrier Fu…

Physical human-robot collaboration (pHRC) requires both compliance and safety guarantees since robots coordinate with human actions in a shared workspace. This paper presents a novel fixed-time adaptive neural control methodology for…

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…

We present a closed-form optimal control that satisfies both safety constraints (i.e., state constraints) and input constraints (e.g., actuator limits) using a composition of multiple control barrier functions (CBFs). This main contribution…

Deep learning has enjoyed much recent success, and applying state-of-the-art model learning methods to controls is an exciting prospect. However, there is a strong reluctance to use these methods on safety-critical systems, which have…

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to explore their environment to learn optimal behaviors and achieve maximum rewards. However, exploration can be risky when training RL directly on real systems, while simulation-based training…

This paper develops a safety analysis method for stochastic systems that is sensitive to the possibility and severity of rare harmful outcomes. We define risk-sensitive safe sets as sub-level sets of the solution to a non-standard optimal…

Obstacle avoidance is central to safe navigation, especially for robots with arbitrary and nonconvex geometries operating in cluttered environments. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) approaches often rely on analytic clearance…

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based adaptive cruise control systems (ACC) that learn and adapt to road, traffic and vehicle conditions are attractive for enhancing vehicle energy efficiency and traffic flow. However, the application of RL in…

This work proposes a hybrid framework for car-like robots with obstacle avoidance, global convergence, and safety, where safety is interpreted as path invariance, namely, once the robot converges to the path, it never leaves the path. Given…

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a simple yet effective way for safe control synthesis. Recently, work has been done using differentiable optimization (diffOpt) based methods to systematically construct CBFs for static obstacle…

This paper studies the problem of risk-averse receding horizon motion planning for agents with uncertain dynamics, in the presence of stochastic, dynamic obstacles. We propose a model predictive control (MPC) scheme that formulates the…

Designing safety-critical controllers for acceleration-controlled unicycle robots is challenging, as control inputs may not appear in the constraints of control Lyapunov functions(CLFs) and control barrier functions (CBFs), leading to…

We derive time and energy-optimal policies for a Connected Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) to execute lane change maneuvers in mixed traffic, i.e., in the presence of both CAVs and Human Driven Vehicles (HDVs). These policies are also shown to be…

To further improve the learning efficiency and performance of reinforcement learning (RL), in this paper we propose a novel uncertainty-aware model-based RL (UA-MBRL) framework, and then implement and validate it in autonomous driving under…

As autonomous systems become more ubiquitous in daily life, ensuring high performance with guaranteed safety is crucial. However, safety and performance could be competing objectives, which makes their co-optimization difficult.…

A predictive control barrier function (PCBF) based safety filter is a modular framework to verify safety of a control input by predicting a future trajectory. The approach relies on the solution of two optimization problems, first computing…

In this paper, we introduce the notion of periodic safety, which requires that the system trajectories periodically visit a subset of a forward-invariant safe set, and utilize it in a multi-rate framework where a high-level planner…

In this work, we propose a cascaded scheme of linear Model prediction Control (MPC) based on Control Barrier Functions (CBF) with Dynamic Feedback Linearization (DFL) for Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).…

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…

We investigate the problem of safe control synthesis for systems operating in environments with uncontrollable agents whose dynamics are unknown but coupled with those of the controlled system. This scenario naturally arises in various…