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To verify the correct operation of systems, engineers need to determine the set of configurations of a dynamical model that are able to safely reach a specified configuration under a control law. Unfortunately, constructing models for…
Autonomous robots can benefit greatly from human-provided semantic characterizations of uncertain task environments and states. However, the development of integrated strategies which let robots model, communicate, and act on such 'soft…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) model decision making under uncertainty. While there are many approaches to approximately solving POMDPs, we aim to address the problem of learning such models. In particular, we are…
Uncontrolled intersections account for a significant fraction of roadway crashes due to ambiguous right-of-way rules, occlusions, and unpredictable driver behavior. While autonomous vehicle research has explored uncertainty-aware decision…
Deciding which sensing capabilities to deploy on an agent in uncertain domains is a fundamental engineering challenge, in which one balances task achievability against the high costs of hardware and processing. This problem has previously…
It is well known that for any finite state Markov decision process (MDP) there is a memoryless deterministic policy that maximizes the expected reward. For partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), optimal memoryless policies…
This paper presents a data-driven approach for multi-robot coordination in partially-observable domains based on Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) and macro-actions (MAs). Dec-POMDPs provide a general…
Uncertain partially observable Markov decision processes (uPOMDPs) allow the probabilistic transition and observation functions of standard POMDPs to belong to a so-called uncertainty set. Such uncertainty, referred to as epistemic…
The threats posed by evolving cyberattacks have led to increased research related to software systems that can self-protect. One topic in this domain is Moving Target Defense (MTD), which changes software characteristics in the protected…
Uncertainties in dynamic road environments pose significant challenges for behavior and trajectory planning in autonomous driving. This paper introduces Hi-Drive, a hierarchical planning algorithm addressing uncertainties at both behavior…
In this paper, we propose a whole-body planning framework that unifies dynamic locomotion and manipulation tasks by formulating a single multi-contact optimal control problem. We model the hybrid nature of a generic multi-limbed mobile…
Motion planning is a difficult problem in robot control. The complexity of the problem is directly related to the dimension of the robot's configuration space. While in many theoretical calculations and practical applications the…
In shared autonomy, a user and autonomous system work together to achieve shared goals. To collaborate effectively, the autonomous system must know the user's goal. As such, most prior works follow a predict-then-act model, first predicting…
This paper is on decision making of autonomous vehicles for handling roundabouts. The round intersection is introduced first followed by the Markov Decision Processes (MDP), the Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) and the…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) is a widely used model to represent the interaction of an environment and an agent, under state uncertainty. Since the agent does not observe the environment state, its uncertainty is…
Glovebox decommissioning tasks usually require manipulating relatively heavy objects in a highly constrained environment. Thus, contact with the surroundings becomes inevitable. In order to allow the robot to interact with the environment…
Manipulation planning is the task of computing robot trajectories that move a set of objects to their target configuration while satisfying physically feasibility. In contrast to existing works that assume known object templates, we are…
We study the problem of rapidly identifying contact dynamics of unknown objects in partially known environments. The key innovation of our method is a novel formulation of the contact dynamics estimation problem as the joint estimation of…
Coordination of distributed agents is required for problems arising in many areas, including multi-robot systems, networking and e-commerce. As a formal framework for such problems, we use the decentralized partially observable Markov…
This paper presents a contact-implicit model predictive control (MPC) framework for the real-time discovery of multi-contact motions, without predefined contact mode sequences or foothold positions. This approach utilizes the…