Related papers: How Are Learned Perception-Based Controllers Impac…
In this paper we prove the existence of a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and robustness in perception-based control, where control decisions rely solely on data-driven, and often incompletely trained, perception maps. In particular,…
Designing optimal controllers continues to be challenging as systems are becoming complex and are inherently nonlinear. The principal advantage of reinforcement learning (RL) is its ability to learn from the interaction with the environment…
In this paper, three recently introduced reinforcement learning (RL) methods are used to generate human-interpretable policies for the cart-pole balancing benchmark. The novel RL methods learn human-interpretable policies in the form of…
Advances in computer vision and machine learning enable robots to perceive their surroundings in powerful new ways, but these perception modules have well-known fragilities. We consider the problem of synthesizing a safe controller that is…
Motivated by vision-based control of autonomous vehicles, we consider the problem of controlling a known linear dynamical system for which partial state information, such as vehicle position, is extracted from complex and nonlinear data,…
Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…
Robust control theory studies the effect of noise, disturbances, and other uncertainty on system performance. Despite growing recognition across science and engineering that robustness and efficiency tradeoffs dominate the evolution and…
Conventional feedback control methods can solve various types of robot control problems very efficiently by capturing the structure with explicit models, such as rigid body equations of motion. However, many control problems in modern…
Robots have to face challenging perceptual settings, including changes in viewpoint, lighting, and background. Current simulated reinforcement learning (RL) benchmarks such as DM Control provide visual input without such complexity, which…
We study the problem of target stabilization with robust obstacle avoidance in robots and vehicles that have access only to vision-based sensors for the purpose of realtime localization. This problem is particularly challenging due to the…
Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…
Reinforcement learning (RL) experiments have notoriously high variance, and minor details can have disproportionately large effects on measured outcomes. This is problematic for creating reproducible research and also serves as an obstacle…
Motivated by perception-based control problems in autonomous systems, this paper addresses the problem of developing feedback controllers to regulate the inputs and the states of a dynamical system to optimal solutions of an optimization…
This paper studies the robustness of observability of a linear time-invariant system under sensor failures from a computational perspective. To be precise, the problem of determining the minimum number of sensors whose removal can destroy…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has gained prominence as an effective approach for control systems. However, its practical deployment is impeded by state perturbations that can severely impact system performance. Addressing this critical…
Robust control problems have significant practical implications since external disturbances can significantly impact the performance of control methods. Existing robust control methods excel at control-affine systems but fail at neural…
We provide a new perspective to understand why reinforcement learning (RL) struggles with robustness and generalization. We show, by examples, that local optimal policies may contain unstable control for some dynamic parameters and…
Reinforcement Learning (RL), among other learning-based methods, represents powerful tools to solve complex robotic tasks (e.g., actuation, manipulation, navigation, etc.), with the need for real-world data to train these systems as one of…
A desirable property in fault-tolerant controllers is adaptability to system changes as they evolve during systems operations. An adaptive controller does not require optimal control policies to be enumerated for possible faults. Instead it…