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Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a powerful tool for the constrained control of nonlinear systems; however, the majority of results in the literature focus on systems subject to a single CBF constraint, making it challenging to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-05 Max H. Cohen , Eugene Lavretsky , Aaron D. Ames

We propose integrating an approximation of a predictive control barrier function (PCBF) in a safety filter framework, resulting in a prediction horizon independent formulation. The PCBF is defined through the value function of an optimal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-26 Alexandre Didier , Melanie N. Zeilinger

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

Adaptive control provides closed-loop stability and reference tracking for uncertain dynamical systems through online parameter adaptation. These properties alone, however, do not ensure safety in the sense of forward invariance of state…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Johannes Autenrieb , Peter A. Fisher , Anuradha Annaswamy

The existence of a Control Barrier Function (CBF) for a control-affine system provides a powerful design tool to ensure safety. Any controller that satisfies the CBF condition and ensures that the trajectories of the closed-loop system are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-14 Mohammed Alyaseen , Nikolay Atanasov , Jorge Cortes

Optimal control for safety-critical systems is often dependent on the conservativeness of constraints. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) serve as a medium to represent such constraints, but constructing a minimally conservative CBF is a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-08 Tanmay Dokania , Yashwanth Kumar Nakka

Reinforcement learning (RL) can improve control performance by seeking to learn optimal control policies in the end-use environment for vehicles and other systems. To accomplish this, RL algorithms need to sufficiently explore the state and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-21 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Andrej Ivanco

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

This paper addresses the challenge of safe stabilization, ensuring the system state reach the origin while avoiding unsafe regions. Existing approaches relying on smooth Lyapunov barrier functions often fail to guarantee a feasible…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-08 Jianglin Lan , Eldert van Henten , Peter Groot Koerkamp , Congcong Sun

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

In this paper, we investigate safety-critical control problem of discrete-time stochastic systems with incomplete information, where safety constraints must be enforced using state estimates obtained from noisy measurements. We develop an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-15 Jianing Zhao , Zhuoting Cai , Xiang Yin

Inspired by the success of imitation and inverse reinforcement learning in replicating expert behavior through optimal control, we propose a learning based approach to safe controller synthesis based on control barrier functions (CBFs). We…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-10 Alexander Robey , Haimin Hu , Lars Lindemann , Hanwen Zhang , Dimos V. Dimarogonas , Stephen Tu , Nikolai Matni

Control barrier functions guarantee safety but typically require accurate system models. Parametric uncertainty invalidates these guarantees. Existing robust methods maintain safety via worst-case bounds, limiting performance, while modular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-27 Mohammadreza Kamaldar

This paper proposes an optimization with penalty-based feedback design framework for safe stabilization of control affine systems. Our starting point is the availability of a control Lyapunov function (CLF) and a control barrier function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-26 Pol Mestres , Jorge Cortés

This paper studies the efficient implementation of safety filters that are designed using control barrier functions (CBFs), which minimally modify a nominal controller to render it safe with respect to a prescribed set of states. Although…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-23 Pol Mestres , Shima Sadat Mousavi , Pio Ong , Lizhi Yang , Ersin Das , Joel W. Burdick , Aaron D. Ames

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

This paper studies control synthesis for a general class of nonlinear, control-affine dynamical systems under additive disturbances and state-estimation errors. We enforce forward invariance of static and dynamic safe sets and convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-14 Kunal Garg , Dimitra Panagou

Safety is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. Recently, a quadratic program-based control barrier function (CBF) method has emerged as a way to enforce safety-critical constraints. Together with control Lyapunov function (CLF), it…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-03 Jun Zeng , Bike Zhang , Zhongyu Li , Koushil Sreenath

This work introduces a novel Proxy Control Barrier Function (PCBF) scheme that integrates barrier-based and Lyapunov-based safety-critical control strategies for strict-feedback systems with potentially unknown dynamics. The proposed method…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-13 Yujie Wang , Xiangru Xu

Control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) and control barrier functions (CBFs) are widely used tools for synthesizing controllers subject to stability and safety constraints. Paired with online optimization, they provide stabilizing control actions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Hongkai Dai , Frank Permenter