Control Barrier Functions in Aerospace: From Foundations to Real-World Applications
Pre-Conference Tutorial Workshop at CEAS EuroGNC 2026 in Madrid, Spain
The tutorial workshop “Control Barrier Functions in Aerospace: From Foundations to Real-World Applications” was held on May 4, 2026, as a pre-conference workshop of CEAS EuroGNC 2026 at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.
The workshop brought together researchers and practitioners from control theory and aerospace engineering to discuss the role of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in safety-critical aerospace guidance, navigation, and control. The program combined foundational theory with application-driven perspectives, covering topics such as flight envelope protection, collision avoidance, safe multi-agent coordination, constraint enforcement under uncertainty, safe learning, and simulation-to-flight workflows.
This website remains available as an open-access post-workshop resource for participants and for members of the wider aerospace GNC community who were not able to attend the event. It collects information on the talks, including abstracts, recommended references, speaker information, and presentation slides. In the foreseeable future, recorded videos of the talks are also intended to be made available where possible.
Workshop Summary
Control Barrier Functions have emerged as a powerful framework for enforcing safety and state constraints in control systems, offering rigorous guarantees on constraint satisfaction and forward invariance. While CBF-based methods are well established in the control theory community, their systematic adoption in aerospace applications remains an active and important area of research.
The workshop addressed this gap by providing an accessible yet rigorous introduction to CBFs and their application to safety-critical aerospace systems. The invited lectures covered both methodological developments and aerospace-oriented applications, including:
- core concepts and theoretical foundations of Control Barrier Functions,
- systematic design of CBFs and safety filters using optimization-based approaches,
- safety-critical flight and space system applications,
- flight envelope protection and actuator-constrained control,
- collision avoidance and multi-agent safety,
- safe reinforcement learning with formal guarantees,
- CBF-based control under uncertainty, and
- simulation-to-flight workflows for advanced UAV control.
Contact
For questions related to the workshop website or shared material, please contact:
Johannes Autenrieb German Aerospace Center (DLR) johannes.autenrieb@dlr.de
Please note that the workshop itself has already taken place. This website is maintained as a public information and educational resource.