Related papers: Planning on a (Risk) Budget: Safe Non-Conservative…

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…

This paper describes a novel approach to planning which takes advantage of decision theory to greatly improve robustness in an uncertain environment. We present an algorithm which computes conditional plans of maximum expected utility. This…

Uncertain dynamic obstacles, such as pedestrians or vehicles, pose a major challenge for optimal robot navigation with safety guarantees. Previous work on motion planning has followed two main strategies to provide a safe bound on an…

Robots will increasingly operate near humans that introduce uncertainties in the motion planning problem due to their complex nature. Typically, chance constraints are introduced in the planner to optimize performance while guaranteeing…

Robust planning in interactive scenarios requires predicting the uncertain future to make risk-aware decisions. Unfortunately, due to long-tail safety-critical events, the risk is often under-estimated by finite-sampling approximations of…

Motion planners for mobile robots in unknown environments face the challenge of simultaneously maintaining both robustness against unmodeled uncertainties and persistent feasibility of the trajectory-finding problem. That is, while dealing…

As drones and autonomous cars become more widespread it is becoming increasingly important that robots can operate safely under realistic conditions. The noisy information fed into real systems means that robots must use estimates of the…

This paper presents an optimization-based receding horizon trajectory planning algorithm for dynamical systems operating in unstructured and cluttered environments. The proposed approach is a two-step procedure that uses a motion planning…

An integration of distributionally robust risk allocation into sampling-based motion planning algorithms for robots operating in uncertain environments is proposed. We perform non-uniform risk allocation by decomposing the distributionally…

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…

Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in dense traffic is challenging. Interactive behavior planners incorporate prediction uncertainty and interactivity inherent to these traffic situations. Yet, their use of single-objective…

Balancing the trade-off between safety and efficiency is of significant importance for path planning under uncertainty. Many risk-aware path planners have been developed to explicitly limit the probability of collision to an acceptable…

Designing provably safe control is a core problem in trustworthy autonomy. However, most prior work in this regard assumes either that the system dynamics are known or deterministic, or that the state and action space are finite,…

This paper addresses the problem of planning a safe (i.e., collision-free) trajectory from an initial state to a goal region when the obstacle space is a-priori unknown and is incrementally revealed online, e.g., through line-of-sight…

A crucial challenge to efficient and robust motion planning for autonomous vehicles is understanding the intentions of the surrounding agents. Ignoring the intentions of the other agents in dynamic environments can lead to risky or…

We present an optimization-based method to plan the motion of an autonomous robot under the uncertainties associated with dynamic obstacles, such as humans. Our method bounds the marginal risk of collisions at each point in time by…

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…

This paper aims to put forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials, provided that one…

Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…

Recently significant progress has been made in vehicle prediction and planning algorithms for autonomous driving. However, it remains quite challenging for an autonomous vehicle to plan its trajectory in complex scenarios when it is…