Project Grant 2411667

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) Project Grant award for $460,632 will support fundamental research at the University of Colorado to develop new methods for designing control barrier functions. This will contribute new knowledge related to the design of reliable constrained control laws for autonomous systems, enabling such systems to operate at their full potential while guaranteeing safety. The research involves expertise in control theory, set theory, and optimization, with the goal of providing systematic approaches for generating control barrier functions that can formally guarantee constraint satisfaction. The research team will investigate both continuous and discrete-time systems, address robustness concerns, and validate the results on robotic applications. This research has the potential to benefit the U.S. economy and society by advancing a key enabling technology for autonomous systems.