Related papers: Runtime Safety Assurance Using Reinforcement Learn…
Reinforcement learning (RL) controllers are flexible and performant but rarely guarantee safety. Safety filters impart hard safety guarantees to RL controllers while maintaining flexibility. However, safety filters can cause undesired…
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to adapt dynamically to changing environments and optimize performance. However, it is challenging to construct safety cases for RL components. We therefore…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…
This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…
The application of reinforcement learning to safety-critical systems is limited by the lack of formal methods for verifying the robustness and safety of learned policies. This paper introduces a novel framework that addresses this gap by…
We study the problem of policy repair for learning-based control policies in safety-critical settings. We consider an architecture where a high-performance learning-based control policy (e.g. one trained as a neural network) is paired with…
In safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), safety cost is typically defined as a function dependent on the immediate state and actions. In practice, safety constraints can often be non-Markovian due to the insufficient fidelity of state…
Widespread adoption of autonomous cars will require greater confidence in their safety than is currently possible. Certified control is a new safety architecture whose goal is two-fold: to achieve a very high level of safety, and to provide…
Unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) rely on effective path planning and tracking control to accomplish complex tasks in various domains. Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are becoming increasingly popular in control applications, as they…
This paper proposes a Robust Safe Control Architecture (RSCA) for safe-decision making. The system to be controlled is a vehicle in the presence of bounded disturbances. The RSCA consists of two parts: a Supervisor MPC and a Controller MPC.…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for achieving autonomous driving due to robust decision-making capabilities. RL learns a driving policy through trial and error in traffic scenarios, guided by a reward function that…
With the rise of increasingly complex autonomous systems powered by black box AI models, there is a growing need for Run Time Assurance (RTA) systems that provide online safety filtering to untrusted primary controller output. Currently,…
We investigate the important problem of certifying stability of reinforcement learning policies when interconnected with nonlinear dynamical systems. We show that by regulating the input-output gradients of policies, strong guarantees of…
Ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) policies in high-stakes environments requires not only formal verification but also interpretability and targeted falsification. While model checking provides formal guarantees, its…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can achieve state-of-the-art performance in decision-making and continuous control tasks. However, applying RL algorithms on safety-critical systems still needs to be well justified due to the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods have demonstrated their efficiency in simulation environments. However, many applications for which RL offers great potential, such as autonomous driving, are also safety critical and require a certified…
Safety is an essential component for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world scenarios, and is critical during the learning process itself. A natural first approach toward safe RL is to manually specify constraints on…
The large-scale integration of intermittent renewable energy resources introduces increased uncertainty and volatility to the supply side of power systems, thereby complicating system operation and control. Recently, data-driven approaches,…
Safety is one of the biggest concerns to applying reinforcement learning (RL) to the physical world. In its core part, it is challenging to ensure RL agents persistently satisfy a hard state constraint without white-box or black-box…
Groundbreaking successes have been achieved by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in solving practical decision-making problems. Robotics, in particular, can involve high-cost hardware and human interactions. Hence, scrupulous evaluations of…