Related papers: Restart-Based Security Mechanisms for Safety-Criti…
As a general trend in industrial robotics, an increasing number of safety functions are being developed or re-engineered to be handled in software rather than by physical hardware such as safety relays or interlock circuits. This trend…
Software rejuvenation has been proposed as a strategy to protect cyber-physical systems (CSPs) against unanticipated and undetectable cyber attacks. The basic idea is to refresh the system periodically with a secure and trusted copy of the…
This paper tackles the problem of making complex resource-constrained cyber-physical systems (CPS) resilient to sensor anomalies. In particular, we present a framework for checkpointing and roll-forward recovery of state-estimates in…
Although an ever-growing number of applications employ deep learning based systems for prediction, decision-making, or state estimation, almost no certification processes have been established that would allow such systems to be deployed in…
Safety for control systems is often posed as an invariance constraint; the system is said to be safe if state trajectories avoid some unsafe region of the statespace for all time. An assured controller is one that enforces safety online by…
Chemical plants are complex and dynamical systems consisting of many components for manipulation and sensing, whose state transitions depend on various factors such as time, disturbance, and operation procedures. For the purpose of…
Embodied AI systems, comprising AI models and physical plants, are increasingly prevalent across various applications. Due to the rarity of system failures, ensuring their safety in complex operating environments remains a major challenge,…
Observing, understanding, and mitigating the effects of failure in embedded systems is essential for building dependable control systems. We develop a software-based monitoring methodology to further this goal. This methodology can be…
Guaranteeing safety in the presence of unmatched disturbances -- uncertainties that cannot be directly canceled by the control input -- remains a key challenge in nonlinear control. This paper presents a constructive approach to…
Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are required to operate safely under fault and malicious attacks. The simplex architecture and the recently proposed cyber resilient architectures, e.g., Byzantine fault tolerant++ (BFT++), provide safety for…
Safety is critical in robotic tasks. Energy function based methods have been introduced to address the problem. To ensure safety in the presence of control limits, we need to design an energy function that results in persistently feasible…
Safety validation is a crucial component in the development and deployment of autonomous systems, such as self-driving vehicles and robotic systems. Ensuring safe operation necessitates extensive testing and verification of control…
Current reconfiguration techniques are based on starting the system in a consistent configuration, in which all participating entities are in their initial state. Starting from that state, the system must preserve consistency as long as a…
Modern society is increasingly surrounded by, and accustomed to, a wide range of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet-of-Things (IoT), and smart devices. They often perform safety-critical functions, e.g., personal medical devices,…
This paper surveys the area of Trust Metrics related to security for autonomous robotic systems. As the robotics industry undergoes a transformation from programmed, task oriented, systems to Artificial Intelligence-enabled learning, these…
Obtaining a controlled invariant set is crucial for safety-critical control with control barrier functions (CBFs) but is non-trivial for complex nonlinear systems and constraints. Backup control barrier functions allow such sets to be…
The paper introduces a Data-driven Hierarchical Control (DHC) structure to improve performance of systems operating under the effect of system and/or environment uncertainty. The proposed hierarchical approach consists of two parts: 1) A…
To address the risks of increasingly capable AI systems, we introduce a hardware-level off-switch that embeds thousands of independent "security blocks" in each AI accelerator. This massively redundant architecture is designed to prevent…
We introduce the problem of learning-based attacks in a simple abstraction of cyber-physical systems---the case of a discrete-time, linear, time-invariant plant that may be subject to an attack that overrides the sensor readings and the…