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Safety critical systems involve the tight coupling between potentially conflicting control objectives and safety constraints. As a means of creating a formal framework for controlling systems of this form, and with a view toward automotive applications, this paper develops a methodology that allows safety conditions-expressed as control barrier functions-to be unified with performance objectives-expressed as control Lyapunov functions-in the context of real-time optimization-based controllers. Safety conditions are specified in terms of forward invariance of a set, and are verified via two novel generalizations of barrier functions; in each case, the existence of a barrier function satisfying Lyapunov-like conditions implies forward invariance of the set, and the relationship between these two classes of barrier functions is characterized. In addition, each of these formulations yields a notion of control barrier function (CBF …