Related papers: Efficient and Safe Exploration in Deterministic Ma…
Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We…
Combining efficient and safe control for safety-critical systems is challenging. Robust methods may be overly conservative, whereas probabilistic controllers require a trade-off between efficiency and safety. In this work, we propose a…
This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…
Collision-free mobile robot navigation is an important problem for many robotics applications, especially in cluttered environments. In such environments, obstacles can be static or dynamic. Dynamic obstacles can additionally be…
This paper proposes a safe data-driven control framework for nonlinear systems with partially known dynamics. The method ensures stability and constraint satisfaction during online learning, assuming only a stabilizable linear approximation…
In this paper, we address the problem of safe trajectory planning for autonomous search and exploration in constrained, cluttered environments. Guaranteeing safe (collision-free) trajectories is a challenging problem that has garnered…
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…
We consider a piecewise deterministic Markov decision process, where the expected exponential utility of total (nonnegative) cost is to be minimized. The cost rate, transition rate and post-jump distributions are under control. The state…
Sequential decision tasks with incomplete information are characterized by the exploration problem; namely the trade-off between further exploration for learning more about the environment and immediate exploitation of the accrued…
Reinforcement learning has been successfully used to solve difficult tasks in complex unknown environments. However, these methods typically do not provide any safety guarantees during the learning process. This is particularly problematic,…
Algorithms for motion planning in unknown environments are generally limited in their ability to reason about the structure of the unobserved environment. As such, current methods generally navigate unknown environments by relying on…
Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in crowded scenarios with uncertain dynamics is challenging where it is imperative to accomplish the robot's mission without incurring any safety violations. Typically, chance constraints are…
Planning safe trajectories under model uncertainty is a fundamental challenge. Robust planning ensures safety by considering worst-case realizations, yet ignores uncertainty reduction and leads to overly conservative behavior. Actively…
Synthesising verifiably correct controllers for dynamical systems is crucial for safety-critical problems. To achieve this, it is important to account for uncertainty in a robust manner, while at the same time it is often of interest to…
Exploration is a critical challenge in robotics, centered on understanding unknown environments. In this work, we focus on robots exploring structured indoor environments which are often predictable and composed of repeating patterns. Most…
Using a novel toy nautical navigation environment, we show that dynamic programming can be used when only incomplete information about a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) is known. By incorporating uncertainty into our…
Markov decision processes (MDP) are a well-established model for sequential decision-making in the presence of probabilities. In robust MDP (RMDP), every action is associated with an uncertainty set of probability distributions, modelling…
We consider online reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition function and stochastic rewards drawn from some fixed but unknown distribution. The learner aims to learn the optimal policy and…
Deploying deep reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings requires developing algorithms that obey hard constraints during exploration. This paper contributes a first approach toward enforcing formal safety constraints on end-to-end…
To perform tasks well in a new domain, one must first know something about it. This paper reports on a robot controller for navigation through unfamiliar indoor worlds. Based on spatial affordances, it integrates planning with reactive…