Johannes Autenrieb

I’m Johannes, an aerospace researcher with a deep interest in safety-critical guidance and control methods for complex flight systems. I am a Research Scientist at the Institute of Flight Systems, German Aerospace Center (DLR), where I work on advanced control and optimization methods for aerospace applications. My research focuses on the safe control of nonlinear systems in uncertain environments, with particular emphasis on robust adaptive control methods, control algorithms for state-constrained systems with formal guarantees, multi-agent guidance and control, and optimization-based control architectures.

During my research at DLR, I had the opportunity to visit the AAC-Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, in 2022–23, where I worked with Dr. Annaswamy on control barrier functions for safety-critical and adaptive flight control systems. In 2024, I also joined the Control Group at the University of Oxford, UK, where I worked with Dr. Jack Umenberger on robust online optimization algorithms for dynamical systems operating under uncertainty.

Before joining DLR, I completed an M.Sc. in Autonomous Vehicle Dynamics and Control at Cranfield University, UK, where I worked on flight control for eVTOL air taxis, including projects in collaboration with Rolls-Royce in the UK and at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea. Prior to that, I earned a B.Eng. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences Aachen, Germany.

News

Mar 17, 2026	Together with an international group of colleagues, I am organizing the tutorial workshop “Control Barrier Functions in Aerospace: From Foundations to Real-World Applications” at CEAS EuroGNC 2026, taking place in Madrid. Further details, including the program and speakers, are available on the workshop website.
Mar 15, 2026	Our manuscript, Robust Safety Filters for Lipschitz-Bounded Adaptive Closed-Loop Systems with Structured Uncertainties, is now available as a pre-print on arXiv.
Mar 10, 2026	I had the pleasure of visiting the Aerospace Dynamics and Robust Control (AEROCON) Group at TU Delft, where I gave a talk on “Safety Guarantees for Autonomous Aerial Systems: A Control Barrier Function Perspective”. Many thanks to Prof. Spilios Theodoulis and the team for the invitation and the great discussions.
Mar 05, 2026	Our manuscript, Combinatorial Safety-Critical Coordination of Multi-Agent Systems via Mixed-Integer Responsibility Allocation and Control Barrier Functions, is now available as a pre-print on arXiv.
Feb 25, 2026	The manuscript, Robust Adaptive Sliding-Mode Control for Damaged Fixed-Wing UAVs, is now available as a pre-print on arXiv.
Feb 13, 2026	The manuscript, A Control Allocation Algorithm for Hypersonic Glide Vehicles with Input Limitations, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics (JGCD).
Jan 21, 2026	The manuscript, Decentralized CBF-based Safety Filters for Collision Avoidance of Cooperative Missile Systems with Input Constraints, has been accepted for presentation at the American Control Conference (ACC) 2026 in New Orleans, USA.
Jan 08, 2026	The paper, Multi-Objective Cost Function for Mid-Course Target Assignment in Air-Defense Cooperative Guidance, was presented at the AIAA SciTech 2026 Forum in Orlando, FL.
Dec 03, 2025	The papers Flight Dynamics and Control Challenges of Hypersonic Glide Vehicles: A Case Study on the GHGV-2 and Towards Cooperative Guidance in Air-Defense: Extending Weapon-Target Assignment into the Mid-Course Phase were presented at the CEAS Aerospace Europe Conference 2025 in Turin, Italy.
Dec 01, 2025	Together with Dr. Frederik Prochazka (Diehl Defence), I was appointed as Co-Chair of the Technical Committee “Guided Missile Systems” of the German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics (DGLR).
Nov 14, 2025	The manuscript, Generalized Intelligence for Tactical Decision-Making: Large Language Model-Driven Dynamic Weapon Target Assignment, is now available as a pre-print on arXiv.
Oct 28, 2025	I gave a talk at the Bonn section of the German Association for Security Policy (GSP) on “Hyperschall – Game Changer oder überschätzte Technologie?”. The event was jointly organized with the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS) at the University of Bonn. Many thanks for the invitation and the engaging discussion.
Oct 28, 2025	The manuscript, An Error-Based Safety Buffer for Safe Adaptive Control, is now available as a pre-print on arXiv.
Oct 24, 2025	The manuscript, Auction-Based Responsibility Allocation for Scalable Decentralized Safety Filters in Cooperative Multi-Agent Collision Avoidance, is now available as a pre-print on arXiv.
Aug 28, 2025	I was invited to present my work at the Institute of Flight System Dynamics (FSD) at the TU Munich, where I delivered a talk titled “Control Barrier Functions in Aerospace Applications: An Introductory Perspective into Safety-Critical Control Theory”. Many thanks to Prof. Florian Holzapfel and the colleagues at FSD for the invitation and the great discussions.
Jun 17, 2025	The manuscript Quadratic Programming Approach to Flight Envelope Protection Using Control Barrier Functions, is now avaiable in the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics.
Jun 14, 2025	Our paper, Sensor-Based Safety-Critical Control using an Incremental Control Barrier Function Formulation via Reduced-Order Approximate Models, was accepted and will be presented at the American Control Conference (ACC) 2025 in Denver, CO.
May 15, 2025	I’m happy to support the robotics community as part of the programme committee for the 13th International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RiTA 2025), taking place December 17–19 at King’s College London. Have a look at the call for papers — it’s a great conference. I’m looking forward to catching up with friends and colleagues in London!
Jan 10, 2025	The two papers, A Quasi-LPV Approach for Gain Scheduling Cascaded NDI-Based Controllers for Hypersonic Glide Vehicles and An Iterative Control Allocation Algorithm for Hypersonic Glide Vehicles with Asymmetric Magnitude and Rate Limits, were presented at the AIAA SciTech Forum 2025 in Orlando, FL.
Dec 13, 2024	Our paper, Complementary Filter‐Based Incremental Nonlinear Model Following Control Design for a Tilt‐Wing UAV , is now published in the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control.

Recent Publications

Pre-print

Robust Safety Filters for Lipschitz-Bounded Adaptive Closed-Loop Systems with Structured Uncertainties

Johannes Autenrieb, Peter A. Fisher, and Anuradha M. Annaswamy

arXiv:2603.14403 [eess.SY], Mar 2026

arXiv Bib

@article{autenrieb2026-ax2,
  title = {Robust Safety Filters for Lipschitz-Bounded Adaptive Closed-Loop Systems with Structured Uncertainties},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Fisher, Peter A. and Annaswamy, Anuradha M.},
  journal = {arXiv:2603.14403 [eess.SY]},
  year = {2026},
  month = mar,
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14403},
}

Pre-print

Combinatorial Safety-Critical Coordination of Multi-Agent Systems via Mixed-Integer Responsibility Allocation and Control Barrier Functions

Johannes Autenrieb, Mark Spiller, Hyo-Sang Shin, and 1 more author

arXiv:2603.05762 [eess.SY], Mar 2026

arXiv Bib

@article{autenrieb2026-ax1,
  title = {Combinatorial Safety-Critical Coordination of Multi-Agent Systems via Mixed-Integer Responsibility Allocation and Control Barrier Functions},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Spiller, Mark and Shin, Hyo-Sang and Cho, Namhoon},
  journal = {arXiv:2603.05762 [eess.SY]},
  year = {2026},
  month = mar,
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05762},
}

Pre-print

Robust Adaptive Sliding-Mode Control for Damaged Fixed-Wing UAVs

Mark Spiller, Lennart Kracke, and Johannes Autenrieb

arXiv:2602.17504 [eess.SY], Feb 2026

arXiv Bib

@article{spiller2026-uav,
  title = {Robust Adaptive Sliding-Mode Control for Damaged Fixed-Wing UAVs},
  author = {Spiller, Mark and Kracke, Lennart and Autenrieb, Johannes},
  journal = {arXiv:2602.17504 [eess.SY]},
  year = {2026},
  month = feb,
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17504},
}

Conference

Multi-Objective Cost Function for Mid-Course Target Assignment in Air-Defense Cooperative Guidance

Ole Ostermann, Johannes Autenrieb, and Carsten Schwarz

In AIAA SciTech 2026 Forum , Jan 2026

Bib

@inproceedings{autenrieb2026-scitech,
  title = {Multi-Objective Cost Function for Mid-Course Target Assignment in Air-Defense Cooperative Guidance},
  author = {Ostermann, Ole and Autenrieb, Johannes and Schwarz, Carsten},
  booktitle = {AIAA SciTech 2026 Forum},
  year = {2026},
  month = jan,
  doi = {10.2514/6.2026-2197},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2026-2197},
}

Conference

Flight Dynamics and Control Challenges of Hypersonic Glide Vehicles: A Case Study on the GHGV-2

Johannes Autenrieb, and Patrick Gruhn

In CEAS Aerospace Europe Conference , Dec 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{autenrieb2025-ceas2,
  title = {Flight Dynamics and Control Challenges of Hypersonic Glide Vehicles: A Case Study on the GHGV-2},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Gruhn, Patrick},
  booktitle = {CEAS Aerospace Europe Conference},
  year = {2025},
  month = dec,
  publisher = {Materials Research Forum LLC},
  url = {https://elib.dlr.de/222660/},
}

Conference

Towards Cooperative Guidance in Air-Defense: Extending Weapon-Target Assignment into the Mid-Course Phase

Ole Ostermann, Johannes Autenrieb, and Carsten Walter Schwarz

In CEAS Aerospace Europe Conference , Dec 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{autenrieb2025-ceas1,
  title = {Towards Cooperative Guidance in Air-Defense: Extending Weapon-Target Assignment into the Mid-Course Phase},
  author = {Ostermann, Ole and Autenrieb, Johannes and Schwarz, Carsten Walter},
  booktitle = {CEAS Aerospace Europe Conference},
  year = {2025},
  month = dec,
  publisher = {Materials Research Forum LLC},
  url = {https://elib.dlr.de/220859/},
}

Pre-print

Generalized Intelligence for Tactical Decision-Making: Large Language Model-Driven Dynamic Weapon Target Assignment

Johannes Autenrieb, and Ole Ostermann

arXiv:2511.10207 [eess.SY], Nov 2025

arXiv Bib

@article{autenrieb2025-ax6,
  title = {Generalized Intelligence for Tactical Decision-Making: Large Language Model-Driven Dynamic Weapon Target Assignment},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Ostermann, Ole},
  journal = {arXiv:2511.10207 [eess.SY]},
  year = {2025},
  month = nov,
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10207},
}

Pre-print

An Error-Based Safety Buffer for Safe Adaptive Control

Peter A. Fisher, Johannes Autenrieb, and Anuradha M. Annaswamy

arXiv:2510.23491 [eess.SY], Oct 2025

arXiv Bib

@article{autenrieb2025-ax5,
  title = {An Error-Based Safety Buffer for Safe Adaptive Control},
  author = {Fisher, Peter A. and Autenrieb, Johannes and Annaswamy, Anuradha M.},
  journal = {arXiv:2510.23491 [eess.SY]},
  year = {2025},
  month = oct,
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23491},
}

Pre-print

Auction-Based Responsibility Allocation for Scalable Decentralized Safety Filters in Cooperative Multi-Agent Collision Avoidance

Johannes Autenrieb, and Mark Spiller

arXiv:2510.21546 [eess.SY], Oct 2025

arXiv Bib

@article{autenrieb2025-ax4,
  title = {Auction-Based Responsibility Allocation for Scalable Decentralized Safety Filters in Cooperative Multi-Agent Collision Avoidance},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Spiller, Mark},
  journal = {arXiv:2510.21546 [eess.SY]},
  year = {2025},
  month = oct,
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21546},
}

Pre-print

A Control Allocation Algorithm for Hypersonic Glide Vehicles with Input Limitations

Johannes Autenrieb, and Patrick Gruhn

arXiv:2510.08275 [eess.SY], Oct 2025

arXiv Bib

@article{autenrieb2025-ax3,
  title = {A Control Allocation Algorithm for Hypersonic Glide Vehicles with Input Limitations},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Gruhn, Patrick},
  journal = {arXiv:2510.08275 [eess.SY]},
  year = {2025},
  month = oct,
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08275},
}

Pre-print

Decentralized CBF-based Safety Filters for Collision Avoidance of Cooperative Missile Systems with Input Constraints

Johannes Autenrieb, and Mark Spiller

arXiv:2510.06846 [eess.SY], Oct 2025

arXiv Bib

@article{autenrieb2025-ax2,
  title = {Decentralized CBF-based Safety Filters for Collision Avoidance of Cooperative Missile Systems with Input Constraints},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Spiller, Mark},
  journal = {arXiv:2510.06846 [eess.SY]},
  year = {2025},
  month = oct,
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06846},
}

Journal

Quadratic Programming Approach to Flight Envelope Protection Using Control Barrier Functions

Johannes Autenrieb

Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, Sep 2025

Bib

@article{autenrieb2025-ax1,
  title = {Quadratic Programming Approach to Flight Envelope Protection Using Control Barrier Functions},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes},
  journal = {Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics},
  year = {2025},
  month = sep,
  url = {https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.G009203},
}

Conference

Sensor-Based Safety-Critical Control using an Incremental Control Barrier Function Formulation via Reduced-Order Approximate Models

Johannes Autenrieb, and Hyo-Sang Shin

In 2025 American Control Conference (ACC) , Jul 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{autenrieb2024-ax,
  title = {Sensor-Based Safety-Critical Control using an Incremental Control Barrier Function Formulation via Reduced-Order Approximate Models},
  booktitle = {2025 American Control Conference (ACC)},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Shin, Hyo-Sang},
  year = {2025},
  month = jul,
  pages = {374-381},
  url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11107913},
  doi = {10.23919/ACC63710.2025.11107913},
}

Conference

A Quasi-LPV Approach for Gain Scheduling Cascaded NDI-Based Controllers for Hypersonic Glide Vehicles

Johannes Autenrieb, and Patrick Gruhn

In AIAA SCITECH 2025 Forum , Jan 2025

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{Autenrieb2025-st2,
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Gruhn, Patrick},
  title = {A Quasi-LPV Approach for Gain Scheduling Cascaded NDI-Based Controllers for Hypersonic Glide Vehicles},
  booktitle = {AIAA SCITECH 2025 Forum},
  year = {2025},
  month = jan,
  chapter = {},
  pages = {},
  doi = {10.2514/6.2025-1908},
  url = {https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2025-1908},
  eprint = {https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2025-1908},
}

Conference

An Iterative Control Allocation Algorithm for Hypersonic Glide Vehicles with Asymmetric Magnitude and Rate Limits

Johannes Autenrieb, and Patrick Gruhn

In AIAA SCITECH 2025 Forum , Jan 2025

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{Autenrieb2025-st1,
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Gruhn, Patrick},
  title = {An Iterative Control Allocation Algorithm for Hypersonic Glide Vehicles with Asymmetric Magnitude and Rate Limits},
  booktitle = {AIAA SCITECH 2025 Forum},
  year = {2025},
  month = jan,
  chapter = {},
  pages = {},
  doi = {10.2514/6.2025-2265},
  url = {https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2025-2265},
  eprint = {https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2025-2265},
}

Journal

Complementary Filter‐Based Incremental Nonlinear Model Following Control Design for a Tilt‐Wing UAV

Johannes Autenrieb, and Hyo‐Sang Shin

International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, Dec 2024

Bib HTML

@article{Autenrieb2024-ijrnc,
  title = {Complementary Filter‐Based Incremental Nonlinear Model Following Control Design for a Tilt‐Wing UAV},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Shin, Hyo‐Sang},
  journal = {International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control},
  publisher = {John Wiley & Sons, Inc.},
  pages = {},
  month = dec,
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1002/rnc.7743},
  eprint = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rnc.7743},
  url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rnc.7743},
}

Journal

Flight control design for a hypersonic waverider configuration: A non-linear model following control approach

Johannes Autenrieb, and Nicolas Fezans

CEAS Space Journal, Apr 2024

Bib HTML

@article{Autenrieb2024-sj,
  title = {Flight control design for a hypersonic waverider configuration: A non-linear model following control approach},
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Fezans, Nicolas},
  journal = {CEAS Space Journal},
  publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media LLC},
  pages = {1--24},
  month = apr,
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1007/s12567-024-00544-0},
  eprint = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12567-024-00544-0},
  url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12567-024-00544-0},
}

Conference

Safe and Stable Adaptive Control for a Class of Dynamic Systems

Johannes Autenrieb, and Anuradha Annaswamy

In 2023 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) , Dec 2023

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{Autenrieb2023-cd,
  author = {Autenrieb, Johannes and Annaswamy, Anuradha},
  booktitle = {2023 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)},
  title = {Safe and Stable Adaptive Control for a Class of Dynamic Systems},
  year = {2023},
  month = dec,
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  pages = {5059-5066},
  keywords = {Damping;Missiles;Uncertainty;Stability analysis;Real-time systems;Safety;Quadratic programming},
  doi = {10.1109/CDC49753.2023.10383779},
  eprint = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10383779},
  url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10383779},
}