Control Barrier Corridors: From Safety Functions to Safe Sets

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Arslan, Ömür, Atanasov, Nikolay
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Arslan, Ömür
Atanasov, Nikolay
author_facet Arslan, Ömür
Atanasov, Nikolay
contents Safe autonomy is a critical requirement and a key enabler for robots to operate safely in unstructured complex environments. Control barrier functions and safe motion corridors are two widely used but technically distinct safety methods, functional and geometric, respectively, for safe motion planning and control. Control barrier functions are applied to the safety filtering of control inputs to limit the decay rate of system safety, whereas safe motion corridors are geometrically constructed to define a local safe zone around the system state for use in motion optimization and reference-governor design. This paper introduces a new notion of control barrier corridors, which unifies these two approaches by converting control barrier functions into local safe goal regions for reference goal selection in feedback control systems. We show, with examples on fully actuated systems, kinematic unicycles, and linear output regulation systems, that individual state safety can be extended locally over control barrier corridors for convex barrier functions, provided the control convergence rate matches the barrier decay rate, highlighting a trade-off between safety and reactiveness. Such safe control barrier corridors enable safely reachable persistent goal selection over continuously changing barrier corridors during system motion, which we demonstrate for verifiably safe and persistent path following in autonomous exploration of unknown environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_06494
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Control Barrier Corridors: From Safety Functions to Safe Sets
Arslan, Ömür
Atanasov, Nikolay
Robotics
Systems and Control
68T40, 93Bxx, 93Cxx
I.2.9; I.2.8
Safe autonomy is a critical requirement and a key enabler for robots to operate safely in unstructured complex environments. Control barrier functions and safe motion corridors are two widely used but technically distinct safety methods, functional and geometric, respectively, for safe motion planning and control. Control barrier functions are applied to the safety filtering of control inputs to limit the decay rate of system safety, whereas safe motion corridors are geometrically constructed to define a local safe zone around the system state for use in motion optimization and reference-governor design. This paper introduces a new notion of control barrier corridors, which unifies these two approaches by converting control barrier functions into local safe goal regions for reference goal selection in feedback control systems. We show, with examples on fully actuated systems, kinematic unicycles, and linear output regulation systems, that individual state safety can be extended locally over control barrier corridors for convex barrier functions, provided the control convergence rate matches the barrier decay rate, highlighting a trade-off between safety and reactiveness. Such safe control barrier corridors enable safely reachable persistent goal selection over continuously changing barrier corridors during system motion, which we demonstrate for verifiably safe and persistent path following in autonomous exploration of unknown environments.
title Control Barrier Corridors: From Safety Functions to Safe Sets
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
68T40, 93Bxx, 93Cxx
I.2.9; I.2.8
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06494