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Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be an effective tool for performing safe control synthesis for nonlinear systems. However, guaranteeing safety in the presence of disturbances and input constraints for high relative degree…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Luzia Knoedler , Oswin So , Ji Yin , Mitchell Black , Zachary Serlin , Panagiotis Tsiotras , Javier Alonso-Mora , Chuchu Fan

As autonomous systems become increasingly prevalent in daily life, ensuring their safety is paramount. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as an effective tool for guaranteeing safety; however, manually designing them for specific…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Shreenabh Agrawal , Manan Tayal , Aditya Singh , Shishir Kolathaya

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a popular tool for safety certification of nonlinear dynamical control systems. Recently, CBFs represented as neural networks have shown great promise due to their expressiveness and applicability to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Nikolaus Vertovec , Frederik Baymler Mathiesen , Thom Badings , Luca Laurenti , Alessandro Abate

Safe navigation of autonomous robots remains one of the core challenges in the field, especially in dynamic and uncertain environments. One of the prevalent approaches is safety filtering based on control barrier functions (CBFs), which are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Bojan Derajić , Sebastian Bernhard , Wolfgang Hönig

Learning-based control has recently shown great efficacy in performing complex tasks for various applications. However, to deploy it in real systems, it is of vital importance to guarantee the system will stay safe. Control Barrier…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-05 Fernando Castañeda , Jason J. Choi , Wonsuhk Jung , Bike Zhang , Claire J. Tomlin , Koushil Sreenath

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found limited success beyond simulated applications, and one main reason is the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Real world systems would realistically fail or break…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Richard Cheng , Gabor Orosz , Richard M. Murray , Joel W. Burdick

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 an elegant framework for constraining nonlinear control system dynamics to remain within an invariant subset of a designated safe set. However, identifying a CBF that balances performance-by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Lakshmideepakreddy Manda , Shaoru Chen , Mahyar Fazlyab

We consider the problem of designing controllers to guarantee safety in a class of nonlinear systems under uncertainties in the system dynamics and/or the environment. We define a class of uncertain control barrier functions (CBFs), and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-20 Vipul K. Sharma , S. Sivaranjani

We study the problem of co-designing control barrier functions (CBF) and linear state feedback controllers for continuous-time linear systems. We achieve this by means of a single semi-definite optimization program. Our formulation can…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-19 Han Wang , Kostas Margellos , Antonis Papachristodoulou , Claudio De Persis

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

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

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) that provide formal safety guarantees have been widely used for safety-critical systems. However, it is non-trivial to design a CBF. Utilizing neural networks as CBFs has shown great success, but it…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-20 Xinyu Wang , Luzia Knoedler , Frederik Baymler Mathiesen , Javier Alonso-Mora

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

Autonomous robot navigation can be particularly demanding, especially when the surrounding environment is not known and safety of the robot is crucial. This work relates to the synthesis of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) through data for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Marvin Harms , Mihir Kulkarni , Nikhil Khedekar , Martin Jacquet , Kostas Alexis

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

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

Reinforcement learning (RL), while powerful and expressive, can often prioritize performance at the expense of safety. Yet safety violations can lead to catastrophic outcomes in real-world deployments. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Lizhi Yang , Blake Werner , Massimiliano de Sa , Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool to enforce safety of a control system. CBFs are commonly utilized in a quadratic program formulation (CBF-QP) as safety-critical constraints. A class $\mathcal{K}$ function in CBFs…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-12 Hengbo Ma , Bike Zhang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Koushil Sreenath

With the increase in data availability, it has been widely demonstrated that neural networks (NN) can capture complex system dynamics precisely in a data-driven manner. However, the architectural complexity and nonlinearity of the NNs make…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-29 Shaoru Chen , Kong Yao Chee , Nikolai Matni , M. Ani Hsieh , George J. Pappas