English
Related papers

Related papers: Safe Control using Learned Safety Filters and Adap…

200 papers

Unseen shifts in environment dynamics, driven by hidden parameters such as friction or gravity, create a challenge for maintaining safety. We address this challenge by proposing Adaptive Shielding, a framework for safe reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Minjae Kwon , Tyler Ingebrand , Ufuk Topcu , Lu Feng

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

Learning-based quadruped controllers achieve impressive agility but typically lack formal safety guarantees under model uncertainty, perception noise, and unstructured contact conditions. We introduce SafeMind, a differentiable stochastic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Zukun Zhang , Kai Shu , Mingqiao Mo

Designing provably safe control is a core problem in trustworthy autonomy. However, most prior work in this regard assumes either that the system dynamics are known or deterministic, or that the state and action space are finite,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xinhang Ma , Junlin Wu , Yiannis Kantaros , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

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

This paper develops a smooth safety-filtering framework for nonlinear control-affine systems under limited perception. Classical Control Barrier Function (CBF) filters assume global availability of the safety function - its value and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-22 Lyes Smaili , Soulaimane Berkane

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.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya , Somil Bansal

Recent work showed that stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states while optimizing quadratic costs and observing state and control constraints can be reduced to quadratic programs (QP) by using control barrier functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-02-12 Wei Xiao , Calin Belta , Christos G. Cassandras

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-07-06 David D. Fan , Jennifer Nguyen , Rohan Thakker , Nikhilesh Alatur , Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi , Evangelos A. Theodorou

Using control barrier functions (CBFs) as safety filters provides a computationally inexpensive yet effective method for constructing controllers in safety-critical applications. However, using CBFs requires the construction of a valid CBF,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Bolun Dai , Prashanth Krishnamurthy , Farshad Khorrami

We augment the Slotine--Li adaptive controller for Euler--Lagrange systems with three learned components: a structured-quadratic Lyapunov function \(V_\psi\) whose positive-definiteness follows from a Cholesky parameterization, a residual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Giansalvo Cirrincione , Adriano Fagiolini

Learning-based control with safety guarantees usually requires real-time safety certification and modifications of possibly unsafe learning-based policies. The control barrier function (CBF) method uses a safety filter containing a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-25 Kanghui He , Shengling Shi , Ton van den Boom , Bart De Schutter

A learning-based safety filter is developed for discrete-time linear time-invariant systems with unknown models subject to Gaussian noises with unknown covariance. Safety is characterized using polytopic constraints on the states and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Farhad Farokhi , Alex S. Leong , Mohammad Zamani , Iman Shames

As assistive and collaborative robots become more ubiquitous in the real-world, we need to develop interfaces and controllers that are safe for users to build trust and encourage adoption. In this Blue Sky paper, we discuss the need for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Ahalya Prabhakar , Aude Billard

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are an effective model-based tool to formally certify the safety of a system. With the growing complexity of modern control problems, CBFs have received increasing attention in both optimization-based and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Lishuo Pan , Mattia Catellani , Thales C. Silva , Lorenzo Sabattini , Nora Ayanian

This paper presents an adaptive control approach for uncertain nonlinear systems subject to safety constraints that allows for modularity in the selection of the parameter estimation algorithm. Such modularity is achieved by unifying the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-09 Max Cohen , Calin Belta

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

Safe control techniques, such as Hamilton-Jacobi reachability, provide principled methods for synthesizing safety-preserving robot policies but typically assume hand-designed state spaces and full observability. Recent work has relaxed…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Matthew Kim , Kensuke Nakamura , Andrea Bajcsy

Recent works have shown that foundational safe control methods, such as Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis, can be applied in the latent space of world models. While this enables the synthesis of latent safety filters for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Sankalp Agrawal , Junwon Seo , Kensuke Nakamura , Ran Tian , Andrea Bajcsy

The transfer of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques into real-world applications is challenged by safety requirements in the presence of physical limitations. Most RL methods, in particular the most popular algorithms, do not support…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Kim P. Wabersich , Melanie N. Zeilinger