Related papers: Credit Assignment Safety Learning from Human Demon…

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for developing new robot behaviors. However, typical lack of safety guarantees constitutes a hurdle for its practical application on real robots. To address this issue, safe reinforcement…

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

Learning robot objective functions from human input has become increasingly important, but state-of-the-art techniques assume that the human's desired objective lies within the robot's hypothesis space. When this is not true, even methods…

Sophisticated automatic incident detection (AID) technology plays a key role in contemporary transportation systems. Though many papers were devoted to study incident classification algorithms, few study investigated how to enhance feature…

We study a human-robot collaborative transportation task in presence of obstacles. The task for each agent is to carry a rigid object to a common target position, while safely avoiding obstacles and satisfying the compliance and actuation…

Robust and efficient learning remains a challenging problem in robotics, in particular with complex visual inputs. Inspired by human attention mechanism, with which we quickly process complex visual scenes and react to changes in the…

Safety is a fundamental requirement for autonomous systems operating in critical domains. Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been used to design safety filters that minimally alter nominal controls for such systems to maintain their…

We propose a method to tackle the problem of mapless collision-avoidance navigation where humans are present using 2D laser scans. Our proposed method uses ego-safety to measure collision from the robot's perspective while social-safety to…

The ability to recover from an unexpected external perturbation is a fundamental motor skill in bipedal locomotion. An effective response includes the ability to not just recover balance and maintain stability but also to fall in a safe…

When deploying autonomous agents in unstructured environments over sustained periods of time, adaptability and robustness oftentimes outweigh optimality as a primary consideration. In other words, safety and survivability constraints play a…

Despite recent advances in robust locomotion, bipedal robots operating in the real world remain at risk of falling. While most research focuses on preventing such events, we instead concentrate on the phenomenon of falling itself.…

Safety is a crucial property of every robotic platform: any control policy should always comply with actuator limits and avoid collisions with the environment and humans. In reinforcement learning, safety is even more fundamental for…

Due to real-world dynamics and hardware uncertainty, robots inevitably fail in task executions, resulting in undesired or even dangerous executions. In order to avoid failures and improve robot performance, it is critical to identify and…

We examine the problem of determining demonstration sufficiency: how can a robot self-assess whether it has received enough demonstrations from an expert to ensure a desired level of performance? To address this problem, we propose a novel…

Semi-supervised learning improves the performance of supervised machine learning by leveraging methods from unsupervised learning to extract information not explicitly available in the labels. Through the design of a system that enables a…

This paper presents a safe imitation learning approach for autonomous vehicle driving, with attention on real-life human driving data and experimental validation. In order to increase occupant's acceptance and gain drivers' trust, the…

In shared autonomy, user input is combined with semi-autonomous control to achieve a common goal. The goal is often unknown ex-ante, so prior work enables agents to infer the goal from user input and assist with the task. Such methods tend…

We consider robot learning in the context of shared autonomy, where control of the system can switch between a human teleoperator and autonomous control. In this setting we address reinforcement learning, and learning from demonstration,…

Learning high-performance control policies that remain consistent with expert behavior is a fundamental challenge in robotics. Reinforcement learning can discover high-performing strategies but often departs from desirable human behavior,…

Learning-from-demonstrations is an emerging paradigm to obtain effective robot control policies for complex tasks via reinforcement learning without the need to explicitly design reward functions. However, it is susceptible to imperfections…