Related papers: Toward Achieving Formal Guarantees for Human-Aware…
Robots are used increasingly often in safety-critical scenarios, such as robotic surgery or human-robot interaction. To ensure stringent performance criteria, formal controller synthesis is a promising direction to guarantee that robots…
We present a tool-supported approach for the synthesis, verification and validation of the control software responsible for the safety of the human-robot interaction in manufacturing processes that use collaborative robots. In human-robot…
In this thesis, the synthesis of correct-by-construction controllers for robots assisting in Search and Rescue (SAR) is considered. In recent years, the development of robots assisting in disaster mitigation in urban environments has been…
The aim of this work is to address issues where formal specifications cannot be realized on a given dynamical system subjected to a changing environment. Such failures occur whenever the dynamics of the system restrict the robot in such a…
In recent years, formal methods have been extensively used in the design of autonomous systems. By employing mathematically rigorous techniques, formal methods can provide fully automated reasoning processes with provable safety guarantees…
Verified controller synthesis uses world models that comprise all potential behaviours of humans, robots, further equipment, and the controller to be synthesised. A world model enables quantitative risk assessment, for example, by…
Robot capabilities are maturing across domains, from self-driving cars, to bipeds and drones. As a result, robots will soon no longer be confined to safety-controlled industrial settings; instead, they will directly interact with the…
In human-robot collaboration (HRC), software-based automatic safety controllers (ASCs) are used in various forms (e.g. shutdown mechanisms, emergency brakes, interlocks) to improve operational safety. Complex robotic tasks and increasingly…
We formalize synthesis of shared control protocols with correctness guarantees for temporal logic specifications. More specifically, we introduce a modeling formalism in which both a human and an autonomy protocol can issue commands to a…
With the increasing ubiquity of multi-capable, general-purpose robots arises the need for enabling non-expert users to command these robots to perform complex high-level tasks. To this end, high-level robot control has seen the application…
Controlling contacts is truly challenging, and this has been a major hurdle to deploying industrial robots into unstructured/human-centric environments. More specifically, the main challenges are: (i) how to ensure stability at all times;…
As robots gain capabilities to enter our human-centric world, they require formalism and algorithms that enable smart and efficient interactions. This is challenging, especially for robotic manipulators with complex tasks that may require…
The future of work does not require a choice between human and robot. Aside from explicit human-robot collaboration, robotics can play an increasingly important role in helping train workers as well as the tools they may use, especially in…
When designing correct-by-construction controllers for autonomous collectives, three key challenges are the task specification, the modelling, and its use at practical scale. In this paper, we focus on a simple yet useful abstraction for…
In this paper, we introduce a high-level controller synthesis framework that enables teams of heterogeneous agents to assist each other in resolving environmental conflicts that appear at runtime. This conflict resolution method is built…
An emerging branch of control theory specialises in certificate learning, concerning the specification of a desired (possibly complex) system behaviour for an autonomous or control model, which is then analytically verified by means of a…
In many practical scenarios, multi-robot systems are envisioned to support humans in executing complicated tasks within structured environments, such as search-and-rescue tasks. We propose a framework for a multi-robot swarm to fulfill…
The requirements for real-world manipulation tasks are diverse and often conflicting; some tasks require precise motion while others require force compliance; some tasks require avoidance of certain regions, while others require convergence…
This paper addresses the problem of data-driven computation of controllers that are correct by design for safety-critical systems and can provably satisfy (complex) functional requirements. With a focus on continuous-space stochastic…
This paper proposes a framework for automatic formal controller synthesis for general hybrid systems with a subset of safety and reachability specifications. The framework uses genetic programming to automatically co-synthesize controllers…