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We present a provably safe sampling-based motion planning algorithm for robotic systems affected by random disturbances of unknown distribution. We consider systems with linear or linearizable dynamics evolving in workspace with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Ibon Gracia , Qi Heng Ho , Luca Laurenti , Morteza Lahijanian

Active learning of physical systems must commonly respect practical safety constraints, which restricts the exploration of the design space. Gaussian Processes (GPs) and their calibrated uncertainty estimations are widely used for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Jörn Tebbe , Christoph Zimmer , Ansgar Steland , Markus Lange-Hegermann , Fabian Mies

This paper considers the problem of online multi-robot motion planning with general nonlinear dynamics subject to unknown external disturbances. We propose dSLAP, a distributed safe learning and planning framework that allows the robots to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-27 Zhenyuan Yuan , Minghui Zhu

Active perception in uncertain environments requires robots to navigate safely while acquiring informative observations to reduce map uncertainty. These objectives inherently conflict, as informative viewpoints often lie near uncertain…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Amirhossein Mollaei Khass , Athanasios Cosse , Vivek Pandey , Nader Motee

Information gathering algorithms play a key role in unlocking the potential of robots for efficient data collection in a wide range of applications. However, most existing strategies neglect the fundamental problem of the robot pose…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Marija Popovic , Teresa Vidal-Calleja , Jen Jen Chung , Juan Nieto , Roland Siegwart

We consider the problem of safely exploring a static and unknown environment while learning valid control barrier functions (CBFs) from sensor data. Existing works either assume known environments, target specific dynamics models, or use…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-03 Paul Lutkus , Deepika Anantharaman , Stephen Tu , Lars Lindemann

Safely deploying robots in uncertain and dynamic environments requires a systematic accounting of various risks, both within and across layers in an autonomy stack from perception to motion planning and control. Many widely used motion…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-02-10 Venkatraman Renganathan , Iman Shames , Tyler H. Summers

We propose an iterative method to safely learn the unmodeled dynamics of a nonlinear system using Bayesian Gaussian process (GP) models with polynomial kernel functions. The method maintains safety by ensuring that the system state stays…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-03 Alex Devonport , He Yin , Murat Arcak

Although Gaussian processes (GPs) with deep kernels have been successfully used for meta-learning in regression tasks, its uncertainty estimation performance can be poor. We propose a meta-learning method for calibrating deep kernel GPs for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-14 Tomoharu Iwata , Atsutoshi Kumagai

Human motion is stochastic and ensuring safe robot navigation in a pedestrian-rich environment requires proactive decision-making. Past research relied on incorporating deterministic future states of surrounding pedestrians which can be…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Anshul Nayak , Azim Eskandarian

With the increasing complexity of real-world systems and varying environmental uncertainties, it is difficult to build an accurate dynamic model, which poses challenges especially for safety-critical control. In this paper, a learning-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-13 Sihua Zhang , Di-Hua Zhai , Xiaobing Dai , Tzu-yuan Huang , Yuanqing Xia , Sandra Hirche

We propose a method to encourage safety in Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) via Gaussian Process (GP) regression. This framework consists of 1) a parametric MPC scheme that is employed as model-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-13 Filippo Airaldi , Bart De Schutter , Azita Dabiri

Micron-scale robots ($\mu$bots) have recently shown great promise for emerging medical applications. Accurate controlling $\mu$bots, while critical to their successful deployment, is challenging. In this work, we consider the problem of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Logan E Beaver , Max Sokolich , Suhail Alsalehi , Ron Weiss , Sambeeta Das , Calin Belta

Learning uncertain dynamics models using Gaussian process~(GP) regression has been demonstrated to enable high-performance and safety-aware control strategies for challenging real-world applications. Yet, for computational tractability,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-17 Manish Prajapat , Amon Lahr , Johannes Köhler , Andreas Krause , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Gaussian Process (GP) regression is shown to be effective for learning unknown dynamics, enabling efficient and safety-aware control strategies across diverse applications. However, existing GP-based model predictive control (GP-MPC)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-13 Manish Prajapat , Johannes Köhler , Amon Lahr , Andreas Krause , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Ensuring safety and adapting to the user's behavior are of paramount importance in physical human-robot interaction. Thus, incorporating elastic actuators in the robot's mechanical design has become popular, since it offers intrinsic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Samuel Tesfazgi , Markus Keßler , Emilio Trigili , Armin Lederer , Sandra Hirche

Ensuring safety is of paramount importance in physical human-robot interaction applications. This requires both adherence to safety constraints defined on the system state, as well as guaranteeing compliant behavior of the robot. If the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-17 Armin Lederer , Azra Begzadić , Neha Das , Sandra Hirche

Accurate human motion prediction with well-calibrated uncertainty is critical for safe human-robot collaboration (HRC), where robots must anticipate and react to human movements in real time. We propose a structured multitask variational…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jinger Chong , Xiaotong Zhang , Kamal Youcef-Toumi

In this paper, we present a robust and adaptive model predictive control (MPC) framework for uncertain nonlinear systems affected by bounded disturbances and unmodeled nonlinearities. We use Gaussian Processes (GPs) to learn the uncertain…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-14 Mathieu Dubied , Amon Lahr , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Johannes Köhler

We present an online and data-driven uncertainty quantification method to enable the development of safe human-robot collaboration applications. Safety and risk assessment of systems are strongly correlated with the accuracy of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Woo-Jeong Baek , Christoph Ledermann , Torsten Kröger