Related papers: Robust Barrier Functions for a Fully Autonomous, R…
Safety-critical control is a crucial aspect of modern systems, and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have gained popularity as the framework of choice for ensuring safety. However, implementing a CBF requires exact knowledge of the true…
Robotic manipulation in human environments is a challenging problem for researchers and industry alike. In particular, opening doors/drawers can be challenging for robots, as the size, shape, actuation and required force is variable.…
In this paper, we present an experiment, designed to investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation. The experiment involves performing variations of mobile pick and place actions and…
In this note, a new reciprocal resistance-based control barrier function (RRCBF) is developed to enhance the robustness of control barrier functions for disturbed affine nonlinear systems, without requiring explicit knowledge of disturbance…
Consider a swarm of particles controlled by global inputs. This paper presents algorithms for shaping such swarms in 2D using boundary walls. The range of configurations created by conforming a swarm to a boundary wall is limited. We…
While social robots are developed to provide assistance to users through social interactions, their behaviors are dominantly pre-programmed and remote-controlled. Despite the numerous robot control architectures being developed, very few…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
Safe control in unknown environments is a significant challenge in robotics. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are widely used to guarantee system safety, they often assume known environments with predefined obstacles. The proposed…
This paper provides an introduction and overview of recent work on control barrier functions and their use to verify and enforce safety properties in the context of (optimization based) safety-critical controllers. We survey the main…
Aiming to promote the wide adoption of safety filters for autonomous aerial robots, this paper presents a safe control architecture designed for seamless integration into widely used open-source autopilots. Departing from methods that…
Safe autonomy is a critical requirement and a key enabler for robots to operate safely in unstructured complex environments. Control barrier functions and safe motion corridors are two widely used but technically distinct safety methods,…
Stable dynamical systems are a flexible tool to plan robotic motions in real-time. In the robotic literature, dynamical system motions are typically planned without considering possible limitations in the robot's workspace. This work…
Robots deployed in unstructured, real-world environments operate under considerable uncertainty due to imperfect state estimates, model error, and disturbances. Given this real-world context, the goal of this paper is to develop controllers…
Safe control with guarantees generally requires the system model to be known. It is far more challenging to handle systems with uncertain parameters. In this paper, we propose a generic algorithm that can synthesize and verify safe…
Modern autonomous systems, such as flying, legged, and wheeled robots, are generally characterized by high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics, which presents challenges for model-based safety-critical control design. Motivated by the success of…
In this paper, we propose a framework for the control of mobile robots subject to temporal logic specifications using barrier functions. Complex task specifications can be conveniently encoded using linear temporal logic. In particular, we…
In this paper we propose a control framework that enables robots to execute tasks persistently, i.e., over time horizons much longer than robots' battery life. This is achieved by ensuring that the energy stored in the batteries of the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled vast performance improvements for robotics systems. To achieve these results though, the agent often must randomly explore the environment, which for safety critical systems presents a significant…
This paper presents two new control approaches for guaranteed safety (remaining in a safe set) subject to actuator constraints (the control is in a convex polytope). The control signals are computed using real-time optimization, including…
Risk assessment of a robot in controlled environments, such as laboratories and proving grounds, is a common means to assess, certify, validate, verify, and characterize the robots' safety performance before, during, and even after their…