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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

A common assumption on the deployment of safeguarding controllers on the digital platform is that high sampling frequency translates to a small violation of safety. This paper investigates and formalizes this assumption through the lens of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-04 Gilbert Bahati , Pio Ong , Aaron D. Ames

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

In safety-critical control systems, ensuring both system safety and smooth control input is essential for practical deployment. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) frameworks, especially High-Order CBFs (HOCBFs), effectively enforce…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-11 Shuo Liu , Wei Xiao , Calin A. Belta

This letter presents a new notion of input-to-state safe control barrier functions (ISSf-CBFs), which ensure safety of nonlinear dynamical systems under input disturbances. Similar to how safety conditions are specified in terms of forward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-14 Shishir Kolathaya , Aaron D. Ames

Deploying safety-critical controllers in practice necessitates the ability to modulate uncertainties in control systems. In this context, robust control barrier functions -- in a variety of forms -- have been used to obtain safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-22 Anil Alan , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames , Gábor Orosz

This tutorial provides a critical review of the practical application of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in robotic safety. While the theoretical foundations of CBFs are well-established, I identify a recurring gap between the mathematical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Taekyung Kim

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

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

Ensuring safety for autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments can be challenging due to factors such as unmodeled dynamics, noisy sensor measurements, and partial observability. To account for these limitations, it is common to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-08 Shaohang Han , Matti Vahs , Jana Tumova

Safety control of dynamical systems using barrier functions relies on knowing the full state information. This paper introduces a novel approach for safety control in uncertain MIMO systems with partial state information. The proposed…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-01 Binghan He , Takashi Tanaka

In this work, we consider the problem of designing a safety filter for a nonlinear uncertain control system. Our goal is to augment an arbitrary controller with a safety filter such that the overall closed-loop system is guaranteed to stay…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Angela P. Schoellig

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

Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to develop feedback controllers that endow systems with properties such as safety and stability. The guarantees ensured by these controllers often rely on accurate estimates of the system state for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-02 Sarah Dean , Andrew J. Taylor , Ryan K. Cosner , Benjamin Recht , Aaron D. Ames

This paper focuses on safety critical control with sector-bounded uncertainties at the plant input. The uncertainties can represent nonlinear and/or time-varying components. We propose a new robust control barrier function (RCBF) approach…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-07 Jyot Buch , Shih-Chi Liao , Peter Seiler

Time delays in feedback control loops can cause controllers to respond too late, and with excessively large corrective actions, leading to unsafe behavior (violation of state constraints) and controller infeasibility (violation of input…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-26 Adam K. Kiss , Ersin Das , Tamas G. Molnar , Aaron D. Ames

Safety-critical control is imperative for deploying autonomous systems in the real world. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer strong safety guarantees when accurate system and sensor models are available. However, widely used additive,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-17 Rohan Walia , Mitchell Black , Andrew Schoer , Kevin Leahy

Constructing a control invariant set with an appropriate shape that fits within a given state constraint is a fundamental problem in safety-critical control but is known to be difficult, especially for large or complex spaces. This paper…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-18 Inkyu Jang , H. Jin Kim

In this paper, the safety-critical control problem for uncertain systems under multiple control barrier function (CBF) constraints and input constraints is investigated. A novel framework is proposed to generate a safety filter that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-21 Jinyang Dong , Shizhen Wu , Rui Liu , Xiao Liang , Biao Lu , Yongchun Fang

Control barrier functions (CBFs) offer an efficient framework for designing real-time safe controllers. However, CBF-based controllers can be short-sighted, resulting in poor performance, a behaviour which is aggravated in uncertain…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-16 Allan Andre do Nascimento , Antonis Papachristodoulou , Kostas Margellos