Related papers: A New Simulation Metric to Determine Safe Environm…

With an increasing use of data-driven models to control robotic systems, it has become important to develop a methodology for validating such models before they can be deployed to design a controller for the actual system. Specifically, it…

A connected and automated vehicle safety metric determines the performance of a subject vehicle (SV) by analyzing the data involving the interactions among the SV and other dynamic road users and environmental features. When the data set…

Reach-avoid analysis is fundamental to reasoning about the safety and goal-reaching behavior of dynamical systems, and serves as a foundation for specifying and verifying more complex control objectives. This paper introduces a reach-avoid…

This paper addresses the problem of planning a safe (i.e., collision-free) trajectory from an initial state to a goal region when the obstacle space is a-priori unknown and is incrementally revealed online, e.g., through line-of-sight…

We address the problem of safely learning controlled stochastic dynamics from discrete-time trajectory observations, ensuring system trajectories remain within predefined safe regions during both training and deployment. Safety-critical…

We propose an adversarial, time-varying test-synthesis procedure for safety-critical systems without requiring specific knowledge of the underlying controller steering the system. From a broader test and evaluation context, determination of…

Modern world models are becoming too complex to admit explicit dynamical descriptions. We study safety-critical contextual control, where a Planner must optimize a task objective using only feasibility samples from a black-box Simulator,…

Automated synthesis of correct-by-construction controllers for autonomous systems is crucial for their deployment in safety-critical scenarios. Such autonomous systems are naturally modeled as stochastic dynamical models. The general…

In this paper we investigate the optimal controller synthesis problem, so that the system under the controller can reach a specified target set while satisfying given constraints. Existing model predictive control (MPC) methods learn from a…

We present Neural Stochastic Contraction Metrics (NSCM), a new design framework for provably-stable robust control and estimation for a class of stochastic nonlinear systems. It uses a spectrally-normalized deep neural network to construct…

A classic reachability problem for safety of dynamic systems is to compute the set of initial states from which the state trajectory is guaranteed to stay inside a given constraint set over a given time horizon. In this paper, we leverage…

In many human-in-the-loop robotic applications such as robot-assisted surgery and remote teleoperation, predicting the intended motion of the human operator may be useful for successful implementation of shared control, guidance virtual…

In recent years, advanced model-based and data-driven control methods are unlocking the potential of complex robotics systems, and we can expect this trend to continue at an exponential rate in the near future. However, ensuring safety with…

This paper presents a generic analytical framework tailored for surrogate safety measures (SSMs) that is versatile across various highway geometries, capable of encompassing vehicle dynamics of differing dimensionality and fidelity, and…

Deep neural network controllers for autonomous driving have recently benefited from significant performance improvements, and have begun deployment in the real world. Prior to their widespread adoption, safety guarantees are needed on the…

Physical systems experience nonlinear disturbances which have the potential to disrupt desired behavior. For a particular disturbance, whether or not the system recovers from the disturbance to a desired stable equilibrium point depends on…

We revisit the Safety Velocity Cones (SVCs) obstacle avoidance approach for real-time autonomous navigation in an unknown $n$-dimensional environment. We propose a locally Lipschitz continuous implementation of the SVC controller using the…

In this paper, a model reference adaptive control architecture is proposed for uncertain nonlinear systems to achieve prescribed performance guarantees. Specifically, a general nonlinear reference model system is considered that captures an…

Traditional reachability methods provide formal guarantees of safety under bounded disturbances. However, they strictly enforce state constraints as inviolable, which can result in overly conservative or infeasible solutions in complex…

In this paper, we consider the problem of controller design using approximately bisimilar abstractions with an emphasis on safety and reachability specifications. We propose abstraction-based approaches to solve both classes of problems. We…